Pop Conference 2018: Full Schedule

2:00pm PDT

Hip-Hop For and By Women

Del Cowie "Elements of Style: How Michie Mee Built Toronto Hip-Hop"
Nate Patrin "A Phoenix Saga: The Voices of Jean Grae"
Amy Coddington "For Women, But Not By Women: Playing Hip Hop for Female Audiences on Top 40 Radio in the late 1980s"

Moderator: Oliver Wang

Speakers

Amy Coddington

Amy Coddington is the Visiting Assistant Professor of American Music at Amherst College. Her book project, How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Rap, Race, and Crossover on Top 40 Radio explores how hip hop broke through to the mainstream via programming on Top 40 radio stations in the late... Read More →

Del Cowie

Del Cowie is an Toronto-based music journalist and editor who has worked as a producer for CBC Music and the Peabody and International Emmy Award-winning Netflix series Hip Hop Evolution. He has also written for several outlets including The Canadian Encyclopedia, Noisey and Exclaim... Read More →

Nate Patrin

Nate Patrin is a freelance music critic who has written for Pitchfork, Stereogum, Bandcamp, The Vinyl Factory, and many other venues. He currently resides in St. Paul, Minnesota."A Phoenix Saga: The Voices of Jean Grae" In her twenty-plus-years of rapping, Tsidi Ibrahim -- better... Read More →

Oliver Wang

Oliver Wang is a professor of sociology at California State University, Long Beach and author of Legions of Boom: Filipino American Mobile DJ Crews of the San Francisco Bay Area. He writes on arts and culture for NPR, KCET’s Artbound, KPCC’s Take Two and other outlets. He is... Read More →

Thursday April 26, 2018 2:00pm - 3:30pm PDT
Learning Labs MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

2:00pm PDT

Intersectionalities

Lauron Kerher "Who Slays? Queer Resonances in Beyoncé’s Lemonade"
Matthew D. Morrison "Black men, Queerness, and Contemporary Popular Performance"
Stephan Pennington "Details Baby, Details”: Listening for Gender in The Crying Game"

Moderator: Meagan Sylvester

Kimberlé Crenshaw first coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989 to refer to the particular experiences of marginalization of black women, particularly through the interlocking systems of racism and sexism. This concept has been usefully expanded to explore the relationship between other modes of identity, including sexuality, class, disability, and what this intersectionality means for those most marginalized. In this panel, we will explore the particular intersection of race, gender, sexuality, class, and region in popular music, as well as explore how these intersectional identities resonate within popular culture. In using intersectionality as a framework for examining the musical, visual, and textual aspects of pop, we seek to demonstrates ways in which these identities are co-constructed and sometimes co-opted through performance. Through musicology, sound studies, black feminism, and queer theory, our panelists will use intersectional approaches to explore Beyoncé’s Lemonade, transgender identity and performance in The Crying Game, and the complex reception of black male queer performativity through contemporary musicians such as Frank Ocean, Mykki Blanco, and Tyler the Creator.

Speakers

Lauron Kerher

Lauron Kehrer is an Assistant Professor of Music at the College of William & Mary, where she teaches courses on American popular music, including hip-hop, and Western art music. She earned her Ph.D. in Musicology from the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester. Her research... Read More →

Matthew D. Morrison

Matthew D. Morrison is an Assistant Professor in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Matthew holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Columbia University, and his published work has appeared in publications such as the Journal of... Read More →

Stephan Pennington

Stephan Pennington is an Associate Professor of Music at Tufts University. His work focuses on the politics of the performance of identity in popular music, focusing on intersectional analysis of race, gender, and sexuality. He has published and presented on a variety of topics from... Read More →

Meagan Sylvester

Meagan Sylvester is a senior lecturer, music sociologist, author and researcher. Her research topics of interest and recent publications are centered on music and national identity in calypso and soca; narratives of resistance in calypso and ragga soca music; steelpan and kaiso jazz... Read More →

Thursday April 26, 2018 2:00pm - 3:30pm PDT
Demo Lab MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

Company Gender, Music, Art, Film

2:00pm PDT

Joni Mitchell

Paul Anderson "I’ve Looked at Clouds”: Joni Mitchell’s Collapsed Pastoral and Affect Theory"
Brian Lloyd "Love and Innovation: Joni Mitchell, Folk Music, and the 1960s"
Nicolette Rohr “A Lonely Road”: Personal Politics and Listening to Joni Mitchell"

Moderator: John Rockwell

Rock stars bear a heavy burden in a culture obsessed with celebrity, and Joni Mitchell is no exception. Listeners have long approached her music with great and often wild expectations that they will find insights into big important things – the meaning of life, the joys and heartbreak of love, the challenges of being a free-spirited woman battling heroically against artistic conventions, and a whole musical scene, steeped in patriarchal presumption. Like Dylan, Mitchell has delighted in frustrating such expectations, and done so as an artist who honors only one obligation – staying true to the callings of her imagination. Feminists have experienced particular disappointment, as Mitchell has steadfastly refused to take seriously any claim that she might be speaking in her music as a woman or for women generally. In this panel, we propose to enter this thicket at the moment that Mitchell was first besieged by generational, gendered, and mass media expectations. She found her voice as a musician while working the folk music scene and found an audience as a singer-songwriter in touch with countercultural ambitions and sensibilities. Paul Anderson proposes to illuminate her relationship to the counterculture by dissecting her “collapsed pastoral” – a phrase he uses to capture the ambivalence she felt about the “back to the garden” ideal at the heart of the hippie ethic. Mitchell both celebrated and mistrusted this ideal, and Anderson finds this ambivalence “at the levels of lyrics, melody, harmony, and arrangement.” Nicolette Rohr also detects strains in Mitchell’s relationship with the nation (Woodstock) for which she had composed the official anthem. Rohr explores the contradictions embedded in the “hippie chick” mystique by documenting the varied ways that Mitchell’s female fans participated in it. Brian Lloyd will undertake close readings of several songs on Mitchell’s first album, hoping along the way to gain some insight into what made Mitchell so distinctive, from the beginning, as a songwriter. He will be asking in particular if Mitchell is deploying anything that, following Susan McClary, we might want to call “gendered techniques” in her efforts to adapt the conventions of folk music to her artistic purposes.

Speakers

Paul Anderson

Paul Anderson is associate professor of American Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is author of Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought (Duke University Press, 2001) and has published essays in Critical Inquiry, American Literary History, Criticism... Read More →

Brian Lloyd

Brian Lloyd earned his Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan in 1991. For two decades he worked and published in the field of U.S. intellectual history, but is now engaged in a study of the interplay between political aspirations and formal innovations in 1960s... Read More →

John Rockwell

John Rockwell was raised in San Francisco and earned a Ph.D. in cultural history from the University of California at Berkeley. Moving to New York in 1972, he served at the New York Times as a classical music critic, reporter and editor; chief rock critic; European cultural correspondent... Read More →

Nicolette Rohr

Nicolette Rohr is a PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Riverside. Her work explores women and popular music fandom in the 1960s and has been published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies. She holds an MA in Public History and co-curated an exhibition of... Read More →

Thursday April 26, 2018 2:00pm - 3:30pm PDT
JBL Theater MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

2:00pm PDT

Roundtable: Doing Digital Wrongly

Jessica L. Robinson, Porshe R. Garner, Ruth Nicole Brown, and Blair E. Smith of band We Levitate
”Doing Digital Wrongly”: On music making praxis through Black Girlhood
Moderator: Michelle Habell-Pallan

In the 21st century, hip-hop feminist researchers have been “working to bring the politics of African American girls front and center” (Brown, 2007) in scholarship and community activism (Pough et. al, 2007; Brown, 2009; Brown & Kwayke, 2012; Love, 2012). Black feminists scholars and activists have a long-standing history of utilizing language and literacy in scholarship and with community to develop individual and collective intellectual traditions that work towards disassembling systems of inequality, re-writing and re-imagining Black female experiences, political thought, art (Lorde, 1996; Jordan, 2000; Clifton) collective activism (Combahee River Collective, 1986; Collins, 2000) and self-recovery from daily attacks of racism and sexism (hooks, 1993) Black queer issues (Lorde, 1996; Harris, 1996; Smith, 2000) and transnational politics (Alexander, 2005). This roundtable, presented by members of the girl-band, We Levitate (https://soundcloud.com/solhot-next-level), aims to extend the legacy of Black feminist and/or womanist writers and artists whose ideas, provocations, and testimonies provided a solid foundation from which to theorize, practice, and make art and in the case of We Levitate make music. This roundtable explores our concept of “doing digital wrongly” as a music making process rooted in Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), a collective space of organizing with Black girls to celebrate Black girlhood. Doing digital wrongly interrogates (1) the resources needed to make music in community with one another based on structural limitations and emotional necessity, (2) artistry as produced without a form and invested in embracing those sounds which are deemed as “alien” based on ideas of “good music”, as well as (3) a dedication to insist on and persist in making political sonics by intensely co-laboring and producing an collective emotive capacity unattached to binary gender schemas.
Guided by an investment in Black feminist and womanist theories and practices, we demonstrate the usefulness and nonuse of a sonic ritualized creative practice that allows us to critique ourselves and structural conditions as well as theorize concepts such as power, gender and form, in relation to doing collective work with Black girls, based on how sounds arrived to us and what we brought to it. To explore our work together, this roundtable will feature demonstrations of sonic creations by each member as well as a conversation with each member on artist-practice and political investment in sonic creativity as experienced through our practice of organizing through Black girlhood.

Speakers

Ruth Nicole Brown

Ruth Nicole Brown is an associate professor in Gender and Women’s Studies and Education Policy, Organization and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research documents, analyzes, and interrogates Black girls’ lived experience and explores the gender... Read More →

Porshe R. Garner

Porshé R. Garner is a doctoral candidate in Education Policy Organization and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work investigates and analyzes alternative forms of power and how it manifest in the intergenerational space of the collective Saving Our... Read More →

Michelle Habell-Pallán

Michelle Habell-Pallán, Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies,University of Washington, is Director of the Certificate for Public Scholarship and co-directs Women Who Rock: Making Scenes, Building Communities Oral History Archive. She co-curated/authored the exhibit & book American... Read More →

Jessica L. Robinson

Jessica L. Robinson is a doctoral student in Media and Cinema Studies (Institute for Communications Research) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work, done in community with the SOLHOT collective, focuses on the politics and poetics of the life-making/saving practices... Read More →

Blair E. Smith

Blair Ebony Smith is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Foundations of Education at Syracuse University. Her artistic and scholarly work with creative and collective organizing with Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths, practice based, publicly engaged, collectively organized space to... Read More →

Thursday April 26, 2018 2:00pm - 3:30pm PDT
Sky Church

Roundtable

3:45pm PDT

Artistic Resistance

Danielle Stein "Infiltrating the Wehrmacht: Utilizing Marlene Dietrich’s Gendered Performances in Clandestine Propaganda"
Tiffany Naiman "Unapologetic Bitch:” Madonna Persists and Resists in Popular Music"
Amy Gentry "Y Kant Tori Kant? Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele and the Aesthetics of Disgust"
Chris Nickell "Cultural Chameleons:” Masculinity, Racialization, and Commercial Viability among Beirut-based Independent Musicians"

Moderator: TBD

Speakers

Amy Gentry

Amy Gentry is an Austin-based novelist and critic. Good as Gone, her debut psychological suspense novel dealing with themes of gendered trauma and abuse, was published in 2016 in more than 20 countries. Since obtaining a doctorate in English from the University of Chicago in 2011... Read More →

Tiffany Naiman

Tiffany Naiman received her Ph.D. from UCLA’s Department of Musicology in 2017 and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University. Her research investigates musical and cultural responses to illness, disability, and aging while contributing to our understanding of the... Read More →

Chris Nickell

Chris Nickell is a Ph.D. candidate in music at New York University. His dissertation draws on ethnographic fieldwork with participants in independent music scenes of Beirut, Lebanon to better understand how participants in these scenes negotiate sectarian capitalism through performances... Read More →

Danielle Stein

Danielle Stein is a PhD student in the Department of Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her current research examines World War II propaganda music and the development of weaponized music and sonic environments over the 20th and 21st centuries. Also a soprano... Read More →

Thursday April 26, 2018 3:45pm - 5:45pm PDT
Demo Lab MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

3:45pm PDT

Balladeers

Sonnet Retman "Swing it, Sister”: The Blanche Calloway Story"
RJ Smith "Deep Cover: After Hours with Dorothy Donegan"
Charles Aaron "Nippy’s Got the Range: How Whitney Houston Snatched Back the Ballad and Set It Free"
Nate Chinen "Wild Women Don't Worry: Cécile McLorin Salvant's Politics of Desire"

Moderator: Carl Wilson

Speakers

Charles Aaron

Charles Aaron is a writer and editor who lives in Durham, N.C. with his wife Tristin, son Oscar, dog Bessie, and cat Milo. His favorite kinds of pie, in order, are Key Lime, Apple, and Cherry. Donations are appreciated."Nippy’s Got the Range: How Whitney Houston Snatched Back the... Read More →

Nate Chinen

Nate Chinen is Director of Editorial Content at WBGO, in partnership with NPR Music. A former music critic for The New York Times and columnist for JazzTimes, he’s a 10-time winner of the Helen Dance-Robert Palmer Award for Excellence in Writing. His work appears in Best Music Writing... Read More →

Sonnet Retman

Sonnet Retman is an Associate Professor of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington where she teaches courses in African American literary and cultural studies. She is the author of Real Folks: Race and Genre in the Great Depression (Duke 2011). She is working her... Read More →

RJ Smith

RJ Smith is author most recently of American Witness: The Art and Life of Robert Frank. He’s been an editor at Cincinnati magazine and Los Angeles magazine. He has written for GQ, the New York Times, Spin, the Village Voice, Yeti and more. He is currently working on a biography... Read More →

Carl Wilson

Carl Wilson is the music critic at Slate, as well as the author of Let’s Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste (Bloomsbury), and a contributor to Billboard, The New York Times, and other publications. He lives in Toronto, where he helps curate the Trampoline Hall... Read More →

Thursday April 26, 2018 3:45pm - 5:45pm PDT
Learning Labs MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

3:45pm PDT

Black Male Interiority

Amanda Bennett "Claiming the Culture: An Examination of Black Christianity and Black Masculinity within Neoliberal Political Rationality"
Augustus Durham "I Love Lucy, I Think?: The Black Feminism of Lamar’s Pimped Butterfly; or, The Making of Kendrick Dinkinesh"
Mark Anthony Neal "The Excesses of Interiority: On the Footnotes of 4:44"
Antonia Randolph "Men Birthing Intimacy: The Case of Jay-Z’s 4:44"

Moderator: Tyina Steptoe

Black male vulnerability is having a moment within popular music. From the #YouGoodMan campaign that sprung up when Kid Cudi revealed that he checked himself into rehab for suicidal thoughts and depression to Jay-Z’s unprecedented vulnerability on 4:44, black male musicians are offering glimpses into their inner world. This panel examines how a range of black male artists balance the hegemonically masculine demand that men stifle their emotions with an emerging space for black men to be openly vulnerable. We ask what conditions allow black male musicians to show their inner lives and examine which fragments of themselves they choose to show. Papers include examinations of the political economy in the music industry that allows Chance to Rapper to profit from his performance of being a “safe” rapper (Amanda Bennett), but pushes Jay-Z’s mediations on black interiority into the excesses of music production, in the form of the video footnotes for 4:44 (Mark Anthony Neal). Another paper argues that men collectively birthed the intimacy that is the hallmark of 4:44, while the final paper finds feminist poetics on certain tracks in Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly (I. Augustus Durham). Taken together, the papers present a kaleidoscopic view of the emotional landscape of black male musicians working today.

Speakers

Amanda Bennett

Amanda Bennett, an Atlanta native, is a first-year PhD student in the Literature program at Duke University. She also holds a BA and an MA from the University of Alabama. Her interests include critical race theory, continental philosophy, black Marxism, and cultural studies.“Claiming... Read More →

Augustus Durham

I. Augustus Durham is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in English at Duke University. His dissertation, “Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius”, takes up black studies from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, interrogating melancholy and how the affect catalyzes... Read More →

Mark Anthony Neal

Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of African & African American Studies and Professor of English at Duke University where he is Chair of the Department of African & African American Studies and Founding Director of the Center for Arts, Digital Culture and Entrepreneurship."The Excesses... Read More →

Antonia Randolph

Antonia Randolph is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Winston-Salem State University. Her interests include diversity discourse in education, non-normative black masculinity, and the production of misogyny in hip-hop culture. She published... Read More →

Tyina Steptoe

Tyina Steptoe is an associate professor of history at the University of Arizona. Her work focuses on race, gender, and popular culture. She is the author Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City, which won the 2016 Kenneth Jackson Award for Best Book from the Urban History... Read More →

Thursday April 26, 2018 3:45pm - 5:45pm PDT
Sky Church

Panel

3:45pm PDT

Downtown Intimacies

Chris O’Leary "Boys Keep Swinging in a Criminal World"
S. Alexander Reed "She Said It To [K]no[w] One: Cultivating an Anti-Public Sexuality in the Early Works of Laurie Anderson"
Judith A. Peraino “To Dear Andy”: Lou Reed’s Mixtape Gift and the Queer Intimacies of Inspiration"
Evelyn McDonnell "Kicking it with Iggy Pop and Peaches"

Moderator: Maria Buszek

Speakers

Maria Elena Buszek

Maria Elena Buszek is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Colorado, Denver, where she teaches courses on modern and contemporary art. Her recent publications include the books Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture and Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary... Read More →

Evelyn McDonnell

Evelyn McDonnell has written or coedited six books, from Rock She Wrote: Women Write about Rock, Pop and Rap to Queens of Noise: The Real Story of the Runaways. She edited the forthcoming collection Women Who Rock (Black Dog & Leventhal) and is series editor for the ForeEdge/UPNE... Read More →

Chris O'Leary

Chris O’Leary is a freelance writer and editor based in western Massachusetts. He has written for Pitchfork, Slate, New York, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and is the author of two books on the songs of David Bowie: Rebel Rebel (Zero, 2015), and the upcoming Ashes to Ashes (Repeater... Read More →

Judith A. Peraino

Judith A. Peraino is a Professor of Music and the Director of the LGBT Studies Program at Cornell University. Her publications include articles on Blondie, David Bowie, PJ Harvey, early snythpop, and Mick Jagger; and the book Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer... Read More →

S. Alexander Reed

S. Alexander Reed is author of Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music, and co-author of a 33 1/3 book on They Might Be Giants’ Flood. Current writing topics include genre theory, punk zines, and Laurie Anderson. Reed’s band Seeming has several albums out on Artoffact... Read More →

Thursday April 26, 2018 3:45pm - 5:45pm PDT
JBL Theater MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

5:45pm PDT

Reception

Thursday April 26, 2018 5:45pm - 7:15pm PDT
Culture Kitchen

7:15pm PDT

Keynote - Music, Activism and the #MeToo #TimesUp Moment

THE SYSTEM MUST MAKE ROOM FOR ALL THAT WE DO: A Summit on Music, Activism and the #MeToo #TimesUp Moment

We are living in a moment of reckoning regarding gender and power. Since the explosive revelations about Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein abusing women were published last fall in the New York Times, women have been speaking out about their own experiences with assault, harassment and discrimination. Women from all walks of life have come forward, especially within the arts and popular culture, . At times it has seemed like popular music has lagged behind the film and television industries in this discussion; in fact, women have long fought for equality within music via grassroots activism and informal communities; in their own songs and by sharing their own life stories. Rock and roll historically marginalized and objectified women; today, the ascendant genres taking its place, from hip hop to EDM to country, often revel in their own boys’ clubs. Yet women have always found ways to make their own paths within these scenes, and to help each other thrive.
This panel gathers together women from different generations and musical home bases to talk about activism, artistic expression and finding one’s voice within the din of today’s revelations and debates.

Speakers

Megan Jasper

Megan Jasper is CEO of Sub Pop Records. She has worked at the label, off and on, for more than 25 years, making her way up to the top from the position of receptionist. Under her leadership, Sub Pop has evolved from grunge groundbreaker to an eclectic label whose sub-label, Hardly... Read More →

Paloma McLardy aka Palmolive

Paloma McLardy, also known as Palmolive, founded the influential punk band The Slits in 1976. Born in Spain, galvanized by punk’s explosive energy, she took up the drums and crafted an iconic style that favored passion and imagination over technical prowess. The journalist Vivien... Read More →

Madame Gandhi

Kiran, who performs as Madame Gandhi, is an electronic music artist and activist based in Los Angeles. She studied mathematics at Georgetown University and worked as the first ever data analyst at Interscope Records before going on to receive her MBA from Harvard. Having gained recognition... Read More →

Ann Powers

Ann Powers is NPR Music's critic and correspondent. She writes for NPR's music news blog, The Record, and she can be heard on NPR's newsmagazines and music programs. She is the author of Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music (2017). Powers also... Read More →

Francisca Valenzuela

Francisca Valenzuela is an American-born Chilean poet, singer, writer, activist, fashion designer and entrepreneur. She has published two books and released three albums, and is founder of her own label, Frantastic Records. Her eclectic, adventurous music has gone gold in Chile and... Read More →

Jackie Fuchs

Jackie Fuchs is a Los Angeles-based entertainment attorney, writer and activist. Also known as Jackie Fox, she was the bassist for the pioneering all-female rock band The Runaways, from 1975 to 1977. After leaving the group she worked as a records promotion executive and music publishing... Read More →

Thursday April 26, 2018 7:15pm - 9:00pm PDT
Sky Church

Panel

9:00am PDT

Genre and Gender

Karl Hagstrom Miller "I’ll Be No Submissive Wife No No No No No No No No No Not I’: Pop Songs for Disgruntled White Women before Tin Pan Alley"
Elizabeth Ann Lindau "Blues Travelers and Wayward Girls: Transient Women in the Recordings of Lottie Kimbrough"
J.D. Considine "Do Guitars Have Gender? Daisy Rock and the Evolution of the 'Girl Guitar'"
Sam Golter "You Don’t Hear Me Though, You Better Listen”: Putting Women MCs on the Los Angeles Gangsta Rap Playlist"

Moderator: Loren Kajikawa

Speakers

J.D. Considine

J.D. Considine is a writer and musician who has written for a number of musical instrument magazines, including Musician, Guitar World, Bass Player, and Guitar for the Practicing Musician. In 2006, he reviewed a Daisy Rock Stardust bass for Bass Guitar magazine."Do Guitars Have Gender? Daisy... Read More →

Sam Golter

Sam Golter is a PhD student at the University of Virginia where he studies Critical and Comparative Studies in Music. He recently completed his MA in Musicology at the University of Oregon and wrote his thesis on the sexual politics of Los Angeles gangsta rap. Sam is also a contemporary... Read More →

Loren Kajikawa

Loren Kajikawa teaches musicology and ethnomusicology courses in the School of Music and Dance at the University of Oregon, where he also serves as a participating member of the Ethnic Studies Department. He is the editor-in-chief of Journal of the Society for American Music as... Read More →

Elizabeth Ann Lindau

Elizabeth Ann Lindau is Assistant Professor of Musicology at California State University, Long Beach. She has held visiting appointments at Gettysburg College, Wesleyan University, and Earlham College. Liz’s writing on popular music has appeared in Women and Music, the Journal of... Read More →

Karl Hagstrom Miller

Karl Hagstrom Miller teaches in the music department at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow."‘I’ll Be No Submissive Wife No No No No No No No No No Not I’: Pop Songs for Disgruntled White Women... Read More →

Friday April 27, 2018 9:00am - 11:00am PDT
Sky Church

Panel

9:00am PDT

Global South

Xavier Livermon "Kwaito Futurity: New Directions in South African Music and Performance"
Erin MacLeod "Them things wasn’t normal”: White Gyals, Dancehall and Jamaica"
Ali Colleen Neff "Mermaids Rising: Women, Water and Afrodiasporic Pop"
Allen Thayer "Black Power and Masculinity in Brazilian Funk & Soul Music"

Moderator: Roshanak Kheshti

Across pop’s global landscape, gender dances with a host of other kinds of otherness: race and ethnicity, place and diaspora, and the non-binary nodes, performances and identities that come from alternative ways of understanding bodies and the relations between them.

Emerging global genres engage with, sometimes reproduce, and more often, critically trick back on the binaries that fall on conventional pop performativities. As we work from ethnographic ways of understanding musical movements that queer the masculine/feminine divide, we lift up the complicated intersections, hidden practitioners, and aesthetic undergrounds in which pop creativity flourishes across the Global South. In the folds of the music, we locate critiques of white capitalist colonial patriarchy: fissures in the entwined roots of gender, race, and power.

This panel shifts the paradigm to ask how gender complicates and is complicated by the global circulation of pop. In many of the traditions we work with, women have long held places of authority in musicmaking and fandom; in others, new movements of underclass youth have worked to configure alternative masculinities and emergent modes of queerness.

As collaborative researchers with musical communities throughout the Global South, we work to disrupt conventional approaches to understanding pop’s gender divide by offering intersectional models for approaching pop innovation and experimentation: the queer cosmopolitanisms of Johannesburg’s Gqom movement, the construction of Brazilian Afro-masculinity in 70’s funk, the queering figure of the African mermaid goddess as she circulates through global pop, the reconfiguration of white femininity in the Jamaican dancehall.

In doing so, we ask: What are the pop sounds and styles that produce gendered performances the world over? How does the fluid notion of the feminine relate to global feminisms, and to the embodied dimensions of musical creativity and movement? How do gender and Blackness intersect on the global pop stage?

Speakers

Roshanak Kheshti

Roshanak Kheshti is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego and the author of Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (NYU Press, 2015). She is currently working on two monographs: Switched on Bach for the 33 1/3... Read More →

Xavier Livermon

Xavier Livermon is an Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He has published widely in the fields of African Popular Culture and African Queer Studies. His forthcoming book, Kwaito Futurity discusses the rise of post-apartheid... Read More →

Erin MacLeod

Erin MacLeod has a PhD in communications from McGill University, has taught at the University of the West Indies and presently teaches Caribbean Literature at Vanier College in Montreal, Canada. Her research interests lie in intercultural relationships that connect culture and geography... Read More →

Ali Colleen Neff

Ali Colleen Neff is a music writer, filmmaker, turntablist and media anthropologist based in Portland. Drawing from her lifelong work with global music communities, she works to integrate innovative subcultures, women, and marginalized communities into the global digital landscape... Read More →

Allen Thayer

Allen Thayer is a music journalist, nonprofiteer, and father of two who lives in Portland, OR. He was born there too, but then he moved away - East, at first, for an expensive degree or two, eventually working in Fair Trade, while writing about Brazilian Soul music by night. Allen... Read More →

Friday April 27, 2018 9:00am - 11:00am PDT
Demo Lab MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

9:00am PDT

Remixing Post-Soul Black Masculinity

David Gilbert "Funking-Up Lift: Parliament/Funkadelic’s Radical Representations of Black Masculinity"
Charles L. Hughes "Size Ain’t Shit”: Bushwick Bill, Sex and Disability"
Tyina Steptoe "Hip Hop’s Queer Masculinities"

Moderator: Christina Zanfagna

From brooding bluesmen to hip-hop gangstas, the history of Black popular music is often structured around iconic figures of Black manhood. These presentations, usually connected to broader tropes and stereotypes surrounding African American men, often limit the cultural presentation of Black music and Black masculinity. But they have also provided Black artists with fertile terrain to trouble existing boundaries of race, gender and sexuality through their music, even (or perhaps especially) when working within the genres that produced them. This panel considers several of those artists, spotlighting iconoclastic figures from funk to hip-hop to musical theatre whose work pursues alternative musical conceptions of Black masculinity. David Gilbert shows how the work of George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic created “more inclusive, transgressive identities for African-American men” that both affirmed and challenged the advances of the Civil Rights and Black Power era. Tyina Steptoe considers how Lil Kim’s work with male collaborators “allowed young black men to perform aspects of femininity” and queerness “without drawing homophobic backlash” in a cultural and musical era of “masculine hardness.” Charles L. Hughes addresses how the Geto Boys’s Bushwick Bill performed a disabled remix of hip-hop masculinity that “negotiated the hypersexuality often attached to Black men and the asexualization ascribed to the disabled.” Finally, Lisa B. Thompson analyzes Colman Domingo’s recent, soul-influenced production A Boy and His Soul as “both a coming of age narrative and a coming out story” that “explores black masculinities and highlights the fundamental relationship between soul music, memory, identity and cultural belonging within African American culture.” Addressing intersections between race, gender, sexuality and disability, and utilizing both close analysis and broad context, the panelists will argue that these musicians are crucial to understanding the shifting terrain of Black masculinity – musical or otherwise – in a post-soul world.

Speakers

David Gilbert

David Gilbert is an assistant professor of U.S. history at Mars Hill University, in Asheville, North Carolina. His manuscript, The Product of Our Souls: Ragtime, Race, and The Birth of the Manhattan Musical Marketplace, was published by UNC Press in 2015 and received the American... Read More →

Charles L. Hughes

Charles L. Hughes is the Director of the Lynne & Henry Turley Memphis Center at Rhodes College. His acclaimed first book, Country Soul: Making Music and Race in the American South, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2015. He has published and spoken widely... Read More →

Tyina Steptoe

Christina Zanfagna

Christina Zanfagna is an ethnomusicologist and Associate Professor at Santa Clara University Her recent book, Holy Hip Hop in the City of Angels, explores the intersections of religion, race, and geography in gospel rap in Los Angeles. Christina has written journalistic and scholarly... Read More →

Friday April 27, 2018 9:00am - 11:00am PDT
Learning Labs MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

9:00am PDT

Streams and Downloads

Chris Molanphy "The Digital Download and the Queens of Pop"
Liz Pelly "Discover Weakly: Sexism On Spotify"
Glenn McDonald "Panic, Death and Other Gender Patterns in Spotify Listening"
Katherine Meizel "I Can’t Keep Quiet: A Feminist Anthem for 2017"

Moderator: Norma Coates

Speakers

Norma Coates

Norma Coates is Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the Don Wright Faculty of Music and the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. Her publications include articles about gender and popular music, sound studies, and transmedia engagements... Read More →

Glenn McDonald

Glenn McDonald believes that music is the thing that humans do best, and that you don't have to understand people to want to hear them sing. At Spotify he variously attempts to quantify awe, turn arguments about counting into conversations about love, and extract new particles from... Read More →

Katherine Meizel

Katherine Meizel is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at Bowling Green State University. Her book Idolized: Music, Media, and Identity in American Idol (IU Press) was published in 2011; she also wrote about Idol for the Slate.com from 2007 to 2011. She is currently co-editing... Read More →

Chris Molanphy

Chris Molanphy is a pop-chart analyst and critic who writes about the intersection of culture and commerce in popular music. He writes the “Why Is This Song No. 1?” series for Slate and hosts the Panoply podcast Hit Parade. His work has appeared in Pitchfork, Vulture, NPR Music's... Read More →

Liz Pelly

Discover Weakly: Sexism On SpotifySpotify’s most popular playlists are noticeably male dominated. Spotify’s biggest playlists in rap (“Rap Caviar”), rock (“Rock This”) and electronic (“mint”) comprise some of the platform’s most visible real estate, and often include... Read More →

Friday April 27, 2018 9:00am - 11:00am PDT
JBL Theater MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

11:15am PDT

Contested Masculinities Across Pop

Marissa Lorusso "Pop Personae and Fashioned Bodies: An Analysis of Pop Star Styles and Soft Masculinities"
Jenny Gathright "What They Say: A Look at Tyler, Frank and Syd from Odd Future to the Odd Present"
Maria Sherman "Misery Business: Exploring the Sensitive Masculine in Modern Pop-Punk & Emo"

Moderator: Alfred Soto

Popular music has always been predicated on ideas and expressions of masculinities, challenged by history makers but ultimately ruling in favor of the purveyors of male privilege who instituted them in the first place. In contemporary popular music, conversations surrounding identity and fluid presentations of gender have taken over mainstream dialogue and it’s not uncommon for rigid ideas of masculinity to be challenged. This three-paper panel will comprise three perspectives on how popular musicians are deploying, embracing and contesting normative notions of masculinity, working to carve out space for flexible and expansive understanding. Our papers will focus, ultimately, on the ways these musicians engage with the restrictions imposed by toxic masculinity, the limitations of those experimentations, and demonstrate potential means of enacting liberation from gender hegemony.

Speakers

Jenny Gathright

Jenny Gathright is a writer and producer from the Washington, D.C area. She studied economics at Harvard, where she co-founded an art collective and magazine by and for students of color. During her senior year, she co-wrote and co-produced Black Magic, a play about black love, and... Read More →

Marissa Lorusso

Marissa Lorusso is a writer and editor based in Washington, D.C. She works at NPR Music, where she writes about rock and pop, edits the Turning the Tables series, and manages the Tiny Desk Contest. She has also appeared on NPR podcasts like Pop Culture Happy Hour and All Songs Considered. Her... Read More →

Maria Sherman

Maria Sherman is a music and culture writer living in New York City. She’s the Managing Editor of TrackRecord, a new Gizmodo Media Group site. She contributes regularly to publications such as NPR, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, Vulture, SPIN, Complex, Pitchfork, Alternative... Read More →

Alfred Soto

Alfred Soto is an instructor of journalism, a media advisor at Florida InternationalUniversity, and freelance editor for SPIN. He was features editor of Stylus Magazine. His work has appeared in Billboard, The Village Voice, The Miami Herald, Rolling Stone, Slate, MTV, Pitchfork... Read More →

Friday April 27, 2018 11:15am - 12:45pm PDT
Learning Labs MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

11:15am PDT

Rethinking Lesbian Sound

Rachel Corbman "Holly Near on Tour for the National Women’s Studies Association:
Women’s Music and the History of Women’s Studies"
Rachel Stonecipher “Sighting and Citing the Lesbian in Live Music Performance”
Jessica Pruett "You Treat Me Like Your Boyfriend”: Tegan and Sara’s Bid for Lesbian Pop Stardom"

Moderator: Mairead Sullivan

There is a growing body of queer feminist scholarship that is interested in the recent history of lesbian feminism, as well as the continued resonance of lesbian identities and cultures in the current moment (Cvetkovich 2003, Enke 2007, Freeman 2010, Hesford 2013, Huffer 2013, Traub 2015, Wiley 2016, Hobson 2016, Hogan 2016, Bessette 2017, Beins 2017). Popular culture studies, however, has remained largely insulated from this scholarly trend, in part because many lesbian cultural productions have assumed an oppositional relationship to popular culture. In this panel, we offer interdisciplinary perspectives that consider the production and consumption of lesbian music and musical performances. Focusing on a U.S. context, and spanning the 1970s to the present, the papers on this panel cumulatively trace the emergence of the women's music movement in the 1970s and 1980s, the ways in which this genre continues to shape expectations for lesbian performers today, and the complicated ways in which lesbian and queer identified women "read" lesbian sensibilities into live music performances.

Speakers

Rachel Corbman

Rachel Corbman is a doctoral candidate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. Her dissertation "Conferencing on the Edge: A Queer History of Feminist Field Formation, 1969-1989" uses conferences to trace the intellectual and infrastructural history... Read More →

Jessica Pruett

Jessica Pruett is a doctoral student in the Culture and Theory program at UC Irvine. Her research examines lesbian relationships to mass culture in the United States, focusing on the impact of lesbian feminism on contemporary depictions of lesbianism in popular music and television... Read More →

Rachel Stonecipher

Rachel Stonecipher is a doctoral candidate in Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation, titled “People Change: Fluidity, Difference, Gender, and Race in Lesbian/Queer Futurity,” explores how contemporary identifications with lesbian culture situate gender... Read More →

Mairead Sullivan

Mairead Sullivan is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Loyola Marymount University. Sullivan has published in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Feminist Formations, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory and Technoscience, The Journal of Lesbian Studies, and The Journal of Homosexuality... Read More →

Friday April 27, 2018 11:15am - 12:45pm PDT
Demo Lab MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

11:15am PDT

Surprising Encounters

John Rockwell "Cross-Dressing in Opera: Trouser Roles"
Amalia Mallard "The Laugh of the Black Medusa"
Greil Marcus "The Irresistibility of 'Take on Me.' (Not to mention 'We've Only Just Begun.')"

Moderator: Judith Peraino

Speakers

Amalia Mallard

Amalia Mallard is the founder of The Laughing Archive, a repository and critical analysis of laughter in recorded music. With degrees in Political Science and Africana Studies, Ms. Mallard has sought meaningful ways to synthesize her interests in public policy and the arts. Her Master’s... Read More →

Greil Marcus

Greil Marcus's most recent books are "The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs" and "Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations." He is at work on a book on the place of "The Great Gatsby" in the common imagination. He teaches American Studies at Berkeley and lives in Oakland."The... Read More →

Judith A. Peraino

John Rockwell

Friday April 27, 2018 11:15am - 12:45pm PDT
JBL Theater MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

11:15am PDT

Roundtable: Making American Sabor

Jasen Emmons, Marisol Berrios-Miranda, Shannon Dudley, Michelle Habell-Pallán, and Dwandolyn R. Reese
Moderator: Larin McLaughlin
Making American Sabor: Latinos and Latinas in US Popular Music / Latinos y latinas en la musica popular estadounidense

The American Sabor exhibit is the result of a long-term partnership between MoPOP, the University of Washington, and the Smithsonian Institution’s Traveling Exhibition Service. The three worked together to create an exhibit greater than sum of its parts. As it communicated scholarly research in a popular voice, the exhibit experimented with multiple media and multiple platforms to allow the dynamics of sound to drive its audio, visual and print storytelling, and to infuse a feminista perspective on music as a process where gender norms are reproduced, challenged, and transformed. Over a period of eight years, 1,000,000 people viewed and listened to the exhibit. For many, it was the first opportunity to learn about the history of the subject.
This roundtable launches the newly published bilingual print book version of American Sabor (University of Washington Press). Featuring a dialogue with those directly involved with the making of the exhibit and book including MoPop’s Director of Curatorial Affairs Jasen Emmons, UW faculty Marisol Berrios-Miranda, Shannon Dudley, Michelle Habell-Pallán, and former senior Project Director at the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service Evelyn Figueroa, our conversation will share best practices regarding the challenges and opportunities of collaborating on a project of this scope. Dwandolyn R. Reese, Curator of Music and Performing Arts at Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, will reflect on the exhibit’s impact. Together we explore the collective motivations and methodologies used to decide on American Sabor’s voice and perspective, the selection of stories and objects, and the media forms delivering its stories.
Like the exhibit, the book version of American Sabor evokes the pleasures of music as well as food, the word sabor signifies a rich essence that makes our mouths water or makes our bodies want to move. American Sabor traces the substantial musical contributions of Latinas and Latinos in American popular music between World War II and the present in five vibrant centers of Latin@ musical production: New York, Los Angeles, San Antonio, San Francisco, and Miami. From Tito Puente's mambo dance rhythms to the Spanglish rap of Mellow Man Ace, American Sabor focuses on musical styles that have developed largely in the United States-including jazz, rhythm and blues, rock, punk, hip hop, country, Tejano, and salsa-but also shows the many ways in which Latin@ musicians and styles connect US culture to the culture of the broader Americas.
The scope of American Sabor required all involved in its making to learn through dialogue, both oral and written, between people from diverse backgrounds and experiences. It began with vigorous debate among Marisol, Shannon, and Michelle in which we shared our diverse disciplinary perspectives and methods from ethnomusicology, cultural studies, Chicanx feminist theory, and performance. As our conversations extended to collaboration with a vast circle of senior curators, scholars, artists, and activists, and senior press editors, we were impressed with the way that knowledge is produced through relationships, and realized that it cannot be separated from the form and context in which it is communicated.

Speakers

Marisol Berrios-Miranda

Marisol Berríos-Miranda is the author of numerous articles on salsa and Puerto Rican musical culture. She’s the co-author of American Sabor: Latinos and Latinas in US Popular Music and co-curator of the exhibit of the same name.Berríos Miranda is affiliate professor of ethnomusicology... Read More →

Shannon Dudley

Shannon Dudley is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Washington, author of Carnival Music in Trinidad (Oxford University Press 2004), Music From Behind the Bridge (Oxford 2008), and numerous articles about Caribbean music. He is co-curator/author of the... Read More →

Jasen Emmons

Jasen Emmons is the Director of Curatorial Affairs at MoPoP Museum, overseeing the Curatorial, Collections, Exhibits, and Education departments and championing Pop Conference every year. In his spare time, he occasionally gets to curate pop culture exhibits like Fantasy: Worlds of... Read More →

Michelle Habell-Pallán

Larin McLaughlin

Larin McLaughlin is Editor in Chief at University of Washington Press, where she acquires books in American studies, critical ethnic studies, women's, gender, and sexuality studies, and visual culture. A UW alum, she returned to Seattle in 2014 after working as a Senior Acquisitions... Read More →

Dwandolyn R. Reese

Dwandalyn R. Reece is Curator of Music and Performing Arts at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and curated museum’s permanent exhibition, Musical Crossroads for which she received the Secretary’s Research Prize in 2017. Reece... Read More →

Friday April 27, 2018 11:15am - 12:45pm PDT
Sky Church

Roundtable

1:45pm PDT

Childhood

Lynn Ellen Burkett "Seventeen Magazine's Musical Canon for the Teenage Girl"
Tom Ewing "Nor Shall My Sword Sleep in My Hand: Boarding School Masculinity in the Pop Age"
Kyle DeCoste "Sounding #BlackGirlMagic: Popular Music and the Politics of Black Girlhood"

Moderator: Jacqueline Warwick

Speakers

Lynn Ellen Burkett

Lyn Ellen Burkett is Assistant Professor of Music at Western Carolina University. She holds a Ph.D. in music theory from Indiana University and has taught courses including analysis of rock music and women and popular music in the U.S. An accomplished pianist, she specializes in performing... Read More →

Kyle DeCoste

Kyle DeCoste is a PhD student in ethnomusicology at Columbia University. He holds an MA from Tulane University where he worked with the Original Pinettes Brass Band to apply an intersectional, black feminist lens to brass band performance in New Orleans. His articles appear in Ethnomusicology... Read More →

Tom Ewing

Tom Ewing is a researcher, writer and critic based near London, whose day job is in market research. He has presented at PopCon about the British charts and about how Eurovision caused Brexit. In 1986 he won a scholarship to Winchester College, founded in 1382 and called “uniquely... Read More →

Jacqueline Warwick

Jacqueline Warwick is the author of Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the 1960s (Routledge 2007) and co-editor, with Alison Adrian, of Voicing Girlhood in Popular Music (Routledge 2016). She is professor of musicology at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia... Read More →

Friday April 27, 2018 1:45pm - 3:15pm PDT
Demo Lab MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

1:45pm PDT

Gender and Power in Interracial Music

Sophie Abramowitz "A Sweet, Separate Intimacy: Female Folk Collectors of the Harlem Renaissance"
Amanda Martinez "Going Out at Home: Privatized Vice and the Consumption of Racial Otherness in Postwar Suburban Music Listening"
Joseph M. Thompson "Foreign Love: U.S. Soldiers, Country Music, and the Gender Politics of Transnational Sexual Encounters"

Moderator: Michaelangelo Matos

One of the sustaining threads of popular music history is a preoccupation with interracial romance and sexual encounters. From the nineteenth century standard “The Yellow Rose of Texas” to the Western Swing of Cindy Walker’s “Cherokee Maiden” to the Orientalist fantasy of David Bowie’s “China Girl,” the allure of love, or at least sex, across different iterations of the color line in different eras has endured for songwriters and audiences. Whether symbolic and lyrical or literal--Elvis crossing the tracks to the black gospel church, Zora Neale Hurston putting Alan Lomax in blackface to move safely past police in the Jim Crow South--fraught spatial transgression is recurrent throughout American music. But what are the consequences for those who participate in this transgression of racial barriers? How and why does gender shape who gets to cross these lines? How does gender reinforce racial privilege for white listeners in search of interracial relationships? Focusing on the experience of listening in different spaces, this panel considers how notions of race and gender combine to form a mechanism of power for the consumption of racial others. Considering both to be fluid identity categories whose meanings are always contingent, our panel charts the movement of sonic exotica as it’s collected and received by white men and women. Rather than taking listening to be an unmediated physical act, we attend specifically to the ways that crossing from one physical space into another--whether demarcated by a national border, a township boundary, or a suburban doorway--affects the racial and gender constructions of the performers and listeners, sometimes each in the ears of the other. By considering the fetishization of women of color in suburban homes and zones of military occupation, along with the faux-transparency of white female song collectors’ movements and transcriptions of black and indigenous folksong, our panel traces the power and limitations of gender to challenge racial hierarchies and conversely posits new ways to understand how women assemble themselves in song.

Speakers

Sophie Abramowitz

Sophie Abramowitz is a doctoral candidate in English Literature at the University of Virginia. Her dissertation, “Harlem Songbook,” is a cultural history that seeks to understand the ways that unexplored exchanges between song collecting, songwriting, and performance can expand... Read More →

Amanda Martinez

Amanda Martinez is a doctoral student in history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation, “Suburban Cowboy: How Country Music Became the Sound of the Suburbs, 1954-1980,” looks at the growing efforts of the country music industry to target a suburban audience."Going... Read More →

Michaelangelo Matos

Michaelangelo Matos is at work on Can’t Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop’s Blockbuster Year for Da Capo Press (fall 2019). He is the author of The Underground Is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America (Dey Street/HarperCollins), Rolling Stone’s number-two music... Read More →

Joseph M. Thompson

Joseph M. Thompson is a doctoral candidate in the University of Virginia’s Corcoran Department of History and a Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. His dissertation, “Sounding Southern: Music, Militarism, and the Making of the Sunbelt... Read More →

Friday April 27, 2018 1:45pm - 3:15pm PDT
Learning Labs MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

1:45pm PDT

Alice Stuart in Concert and Conversation/ Merch Girls and the Gendered Dynamics of Live Music

Alice Stuart in Concert and Conversation/ Merch Girls and the Gendered Dynamics of Live Music
Gripping the handlebars, clad in leather, the woman with the frizzed-out perm sits astride a motorcycle. She leans over, on tip toes, to kiss a little boy, who is her son. This is the cover of Alice Stuart’s album Full Time Woman, a recording that presented Stuart mid-career, in 1970. By then, she was no longer the folk chanteuse in Joan Baez mode, but neither did she quite fit the role of confessional auteur singer-songwriter alongside the likes of Joni Mitchell or Carole King. In 1970, she preceded Bonnie Raitt, who in many respects took up Stuart’s style and approach later in the 1970s and 80s. At this juncture, however, Stuart is out there on her own, riding a new road, a mother returning to greeting her son, or maybe saying goodbye to him for a time so she can set out on an adventure.
Stuart’s career reveals the gendered constraints placed on a guitar-playing, songwriting woman in the 1960s and after, but it also reveals how one woman nonetheless navigated those constraints to map out a rich musical and lyrical exploration of what it meant to try to live as a "full time woman" during the age of rock, which coincided with the explosion of second-wave feminism and the women’s liberation movement. Born in Chelan, Washington in 1942, Stuart began to perform in the folk revival coffeehouses of Seattle before moving to California, where she made appearances at the Berkeley Folk Music Festival and played guitar with Frank Zappa. In the early 1970s, Stuart released two solo albums on the Fantasy Records label, including the aforementioned Full Time Woman. She then formed a three-piece rock band, Snake, and toured with Van Morrison, among others. After time off the road to earn her college degree and raise a family, she returned to performing in the 1990s, now as an electric blues guitarist. Her career—from her repertoire of cover songs to her own songwriting to her gracefully virtuosic guitar playing—provides a more complex texture of gender, race, class, sexuality, age, and region in the story of female musicians in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This lunchtime session will feature a slideshow about Stuart, with never-before-seen images from the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Collection, followed by a conversation in person with Stuart herself, and a performance of two or three songs on acoustic guitar by this wonderful, unsung musician.

Accompanying the performance, as its own installation, with a follow-up discussion:
Kyle Cassidy and John Vilanova, “I’m Not the Drummer’s Girlfriend”: Merch Stands, Merch Girls, and the Gendered Dynamics of Live Music’s Backline Labor

Speakers

Kyle Cassidy

Kyle Cassidy is an award-winning photojournalist who’s done album covers for the Dead Milkmen, Amanda Palmer, Ego Likeness, and John Carpenter. His latest book is This is What a Librarian Looks Like.“I’m Not the Drummer’s Girlfriend”: Merch Stands, Merch Girls, and the... Read More →

Michael J. Kramer

Michael J. Kramer works at the intersection of historical scholarship, the arts, digital technology, and cultural criticism. He is the author of The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture (Oxford University Press, 2013; paperback, 2017). His new res... Read More →

Alice Stuart

Alice Stuart’s career reveals the gendered constraints placed on a guitar-playing, songwriting woman in the 1960s and after, but it also reveals how one woman nonetheless navigated those constraints to map out a rich musical and lyrical exploration of what it meant to try to live... Read More →

John Vilanova

John Vilanova is a journalist and Ph.D candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania whose work investigates the racial and gendered power dynamics of the mainstream music industry. He is writing a dissertation about the GRAMMY Awards. “I’m... Read More →

Friday April 27, 2018 1:45pm - 3:15pm PDT
Sky Church

Performance

1:45pm PDT

Roundtable: Soft and Stormy, From the '70s-'90s

Ann Powers, Emily Gale, Rashod Ollison, Karen Tongson, and Jason King

Soft and Stormy: Gender, Race & Genre from the 70s-90s
This roundtable explores the confluences and divergences between two genres that ruled the radio starting in the 1970s: soft rock and quiet storm. Both are aspirational and adult, distinguished in many respects by their renewed fantasies of financial security and upward mobility. Each genre provided distinct soundtracks for mature explorations of sensuality, love and other sensations both sexy and serene. Whereas soft rock is associated with white suburbanites who gently moved on from its avuncular precursor, easy listening, quiet storm emerged in the 1970s a sophisticated new genre for a rising black, urban bourgeoisie. Individually, we briefly track some key examples from the 1970s onward, before launching into an extended conversation with one another—and the audience—about all things soft and stormy.
Ann Powers will kick us off with Kris Kristoferson’s crossover moment in the 1970s, in order to mark the intersection of country and soft rock, Nashville and Hollywood. Emily Gale follows with another look at the blue-eyed soul of Hall and Oates, and how their performance of emotional vulnerability provides an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between soft rock, masculinity, and race in the 70s. Rashod Ollison then limns the boundaries between soft rock and quiet storm during their mutual peak in the 70s and early 80s, offering some context for their appeal to the lifestyle aspirations of boomer sophisticates. Karen Tongson exhumes Karen Carpenter’s eponymously titled solo album (recorded in 1979, but not released until 1996 after she died), to explore its curious flirtations with quiet storm—one of her rare efforts to break free from the Carpenters’ finely calibrated whiteness. Finally, Jason King brings us into the 80s and 90s, to show how Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds’ affection for acoustic guitar driven soft rock, distinguished his own approach to 80s and 90s smooth R&B.

Speakers

Emily Gale

Emily Gale is a lecturer at UC Merced. Her book project, Sentimental Songs for Sentimental People, explores intersections between American popular song and sentimentalism. Her article on citizenship, sentimentality, and settler colonialism in Canadian composer Calixa Lavallée’s... Read More →

Jason King

Jason King, Ph.D is Associate Professor and the founding faculty member at New York University's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. A journalist, musician, DJ and producer, he worked alongside music impresario Clive Davis to help build and develop the program and he served as... Read More →

Rashod Ollison

Rashod Ollison is an award-winning culture critic and a native of Little Rock, Arkansas. He earned a BA in journalism and creative writing from the University of Arkansas and has been a staff critic for the Dallas Morning News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Journal News in Westchester... Read More →

Ann Powers

Karen Tongson

Karen Tongson is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at University of Southern California, and the author of Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press). Her work has appeared in numerous venues in print and online. She has a forthcoming book with ForEdge Press... Read More →

Friday April 27, 2018 1:45pm - 3:15pm PDT
JBL Theater MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Roundtable

3:30pm PDT

Counterculture Feminisms

Lucretia Tye Jasmine "Groupie Feminism: The GTOs, Girls Together Outrageously"
Kate Grover "Recovering Histories of Feminist Rock: The (Almost) Forgotten Story of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band"
Georgia Christgau "Hear Me Roar"
Richard Cobeen "'I'd Hammer Out Warning': How Women Changed Music Education in Elementary Schools"

Moderator: Katherine St Asaph

Speakers

Katherine St. Asaph

Katherine St. Asaph is a writer and pop critic whose work has recently appeared in Pitchfork, Spin, Rolling Stone and NPR. She lives in New York and has the weirdest YouTube Recommended Videos sidebar of anybody she knows."I Don't See the Expression on My Face: The Uncanny Caricatures... Read More →

Georgia Christgau

Georgia Christgau is an occasional presenter at MoPOP, a retired high school English teacher, and a journalist. Her piece, “Kitty Wells, Queen of Denial” was recently published in the 2nd volume of essays about gender and country music, Country Boys and Redneck Women, edited by... Read More →

Richard Cobeen

Richard Cobeen is a third grade teacher at Malcolm X Elementary School in Berkeley, CA. He has included a music history curriculum in his third and fourth grade classrooms during his twelve years of teaching."'I’d Hammer Out Warning': How Women Changed Music Education in Elementary... Read More →

Kate Grover

Kate Grover is a doctoral student in American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include twentieth-century American popular and musical culture with a special focus on women in rock culture and feminist rock music. In addition to her graduate studies... Read More →

Lucretia Tye Jasmine

Lucretia Tye Jasmine, an artist-writer from Kentucky who lives in Los Angeles, earned a BFA from NYU (1988) and an MFA from CalArts (2006). Exhibitions include Alien She (2015); the Museum of Broken Relationships (2017); a Performance PowerPoint about riot grrrl at the Museum of Popular... Read More →

Friday April 27, 2018 3:30pm - 5:30pm PDT
Learning Labs MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

3:30pm PDT

Fashion

Maria Elena Buszek "Joe Strummer's Silk-Stocking Sleeves: Feminism and Fashion in London Punk"
Lauren Michele Jackson "Beyoncé and the Glory of Black Femme Hairography"
Crystal S. Anderson "Funky Divas: Transnational Feminism and K-pop and R&B Girl Groups"

Moderator: Ali Neff

Speakers

Crystal S. Anderson

Crystal S. Anderson (PhD) is Research Scholar of Cultural Studies at Longwood University. Within the context of transnational American studies and global Asias, she has published on Afro-Asian cultural production and K-pop and manages the digital humanities project, KPOPCULTURE. A... Read More →

Maria Elena Buszek

Lauren Michele Jackson

Lauren Michele Jackson is a PhD candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago as well as a freelance writer and critic. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, FADER, The Point, The New York Times, Teen Vogue, and Complex, among other places... Read More →

Ali Colleen Neff

Friday April 27, 2018 3:30pm - 5:30pm PDT
Sky Church

Panel

3:30pm PDT

Lady Sings the Blues

Daphne A. Brooks “See My Face From the Other Side”: Catching Up with Geeshie and L.V.
Gayle Wald "The Devil's Music: Reviving Blues Women on the Contemporary Stage"
Augusta Palmer "The Umbrella Girl: Women on Stage and Behind the Scenes at the Memphis Country Blues Festivals"
Holly George-Warren “Downhome Shakedown”: The Music of Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton

Moderator: Grace Hale

This panel presents a chorus of female voices on women in blues, discussing a span of more than 80 years of blues history: from Daphne Brooks’ investigation of the 1930s recordings of L.V. Thomas and Geeshie Wiley as a queer blues women’s archive of the everyday to Gayle Wald’s examination of contemporary theatrical representations of blues women Bessie Smith and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Holly George-Warren will illustrate the importance of Big Mama Thornton’s music on Janis Joplin and the blues revival, while Augusta Palmer’s research on the Memphis Country Blues Festivals (1966-1970) will document women’s contributions on stage and behind the scenes at these groundbreaking festivals.

Speakers

Daphne A. Brooks

Daphne A. Brooks is the author of Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham, NC: Duke UP), winner of The Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance from ASTR and Jeff Buckley’s Grace (New York: Continuum... Read More →

Holly George-Warren

Holly George-Warren is the author of a forthcoming biography of Janis Joplin, as well as a dozen-plus other books, including A Man Called Destruction: The Life & Music of Alex Chilton. A two-time Grammy nominee and ASCAP-Deems Taylor award winner, she teaches at the State University... Read More →

Grace Elizabeth Hale

Grace Elizabeth Hale is Commonwealth Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Virginia where she teaches US cultural history. She is the author of Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (Vintage, 1999) and A Nation of Outsiders... Read More →

Augusta Palmer

Augusta Palmer is a filmmaker and scholar known for The Hand of Fatima (2009), a feature documentary about music, mysticism, and family history. Her fiction short “A is for Aye-Aye” (2015) played in festivals from New Zealand to New York. She is at work on a new documentary, The... Read More →

Gayle Wald

Gayle Wald teaches at George Washington University, where she presently chairs the American Studies department. Her books include Shout, Sister, Shout! (Beacon Press, 2007) and It’s Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television (Duke University Press, 2015). Outside the academy... Read More →

Friday April 27, 2018 3:30pm - 5:30pm PDT
JBL Theater MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

3:30pm PDT

Latinx Listening Cultures

Yessica Garcia Hernandez "Latinx AcaFans: Mapping out our Genealogies"
Eddy F. Alvarez "Unruly Hair, Unruly Subjects: Gloria Trevi Queer and Feminist Latinx Fans"
José Anguiano "Chulita Vinyl Club: Curating Culture, Remixing Gender Norms"
Nicolas Centino Queering “The Oldies but Goodies”

Moderator: Iris Viveros Avendaño

While the cultural study of Latinx music is a well-established field of study, the study of Latinx audiences of music and listening practices has received less scholarly attention, perhaps because the role of the audience was seen as a less important, passive form of consumption, or the collection of data more difficult. This panel reconsiders fan cultures and listening from the perspective that fandom and listening are active processes of imagination, creation and analysis. Following the work of scholars such as Simon Frith, Josh Kun, and Jennifer Stoever, papers in the panel address the process by which music is an inner journey of self-exploration and an outer journey of connecting to other people and cultures, and set of social relations.

This panel explores how Chicanx-Latinx fan cultures constructed around music and listening practices reinforce and challenge gender norms, underscore the way desires of various kinds factor into listening behavior, and insist we listen to fans as a means to go beyond fixed notions of Chicanx-Latinx culture. Latinx listening cultures open a space where Latino-ness is made and remade through what and how we listen.

Speakers

Eddy F. Alvarez

Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr., is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and University Studies at Portland State University. His research interests include queer Latinx and Chican@ performance and aesthetics, queer sonic archives, popular culture... Read More →

José Anguiano

José G. Anguiano is an Assistant Professor in the Honors College and the Department of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. Dr. Anguiano is a cultural studies scholar with a primary focus in listeners and audiences of popular music. Dr. Anguiano’s... Read More →

Iris Viveros Avendaño

Iris C. Viveros Avendaño was born and raised in Mexico. She is a Ph.D. student and a McNair Scholar whose academic interests emphasize the integration of third world feminist approaches to the analysis of colonial legacies and projects in present-day systems of violence. To this... Read More →

Nicholas Centino

Nicholas F. Centino is an Assistant Professor of Chicana/o Studies at California State University, Channel Islands. He earned his doctorate in Chicana and Chicano Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara where he also received his undergraduate degree. His work examines... Read More →

Yessica Garcia Hernandez

Yessica Garcia Hernandez is a doctoral candidate and filmmaker in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California San Diego. Her scholarship bridges fan studies, sound studies, women of color feminisms, fat studies, girl studies, and sexuality/porn studies to think... Read More →

Friday April 27, 2018 3:30pm - 5:30pm PDT
Demo Lab MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

5:45pm PDT

Country Voices

Ken Ehrlich "The Twang of Melancholic Masculinity: Vulnerability and Pathos in Honky Tonk"
Natalie Weiner “Don’t Talk To Me About Men”: Re-examining the Catalogs of Nashville’s Pioneering Women Songwriters

Moderator: Jewly Hight

Speakers

Ken Ehrlich

Ken Ehrlich is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. His work on political struggles, history and the built environment has been presented at The Orange County Museum of Art, LACMA, The Hammer Museum, and Museo Carillo Gil, among many others. He is the editor of Art, Architecture... Read More →

Jewly Hight

Jewly Hight is a music critic and journalist based in Nashville. She contributes to NPR, The New York Times, Vulture/NYMag.com and Billboard, and was the inaugural winner of the Chet Flippo Award for Excellence in Country Music Journalism. She’s the author of Right By Her Roots... Read More →

Natalie Weiner

Natalie Weiner is writer whose work has appeared in Billboard, JazzTimes, Rolling Stone, NPR Music, and Noisey, among others. After studying music and American studies at Columbia, where she wrote a thesis on jazz's transition from pop music to art music, Natalie began writing about... Read More →

Friday April 27, 2018 5:45pm - 7:15pm PDT
Learning Labs MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

5:45pm PDT

Louding Out

Olivia Jean Hernández "Chicanx Punk Pedagogy"
Isis Semaj-Hall "From Chanting Down to Louding Out: Gendered Versioning in ‘Equal Rights’"
Laina Dawes "Why Are White Boys the Only Ones Allowed to be Angry? Anger, Gender, and Race in Heavy Music"

Moderator: Maura Johnston

Speakers

Laina Dawes

Laina Dawes is the author of What Are You Doing Here? A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal (Bazillion Points Books, 2012). A music and cultural critic, her writings and photography can be found in various print, online publications and radio programs in Canada, Europe... Read More →

Olivia Jean Hernández

Olivia Jean Hernández was raised in the Yakima Valley and now calls Seattle home. She is a PhD candidate in English Literature and Language at the University of Washington and is writing a dissertation on the uses of Chicanx narrative in the college writing classroom. As a predoctoral... Read More →

Maura Johnston

Maura Johnston is a writer and editor who contributes to Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and The Boston Globe. She teaches music journalism and online journalism at Boston College. She lives in Boston.

Isis Semaj-Hall

Isis Semaj-Hall is a decolonial feminist, cultural analyst, and bad gyal Ph.D. Her curiosity is piqued at the intersection of art and politics. Shaped by her Jamaican childhood and New York adolescence, she has been known to write on sound studies and remix theory, Rihanna, Protoje... Read More →

Friday April 27, 2018 5:45pm - 7:15pm PDT
Demo Lab MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

5:45pm PDT

New Wave

Rob Sheffield “What’s New Romantic About ‘New Romantics’: Taylor Swift and the Bizarrely Unkillable Legacy of New Wave”
Emily Mackay "From ingenue to strap-on dildo: Björk’s adventures in gender"
Ned Raggett "A Matter of Gender: The Fluid Life of Billy Mackenzie"

Moderator: Stephen Erlewine

Speakers

Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Stephen Thomas Erlewine is a Senior Editor of Pop Music at Tivo, whose database of music information is licensed throughout the Internet and can be accessed at Allmusic.com. While at Tivo/Allmusic, he's written thousands of record reviews and biographies. He's also contributed to... Read More →

Emily Mackay

Emily Mackay is a freelance writer and copy editor based in Southend-on-Sea in the UK, though she originally hails from northern Scotland. She was previously reviews editor at NME, and her reviews and features have also appeared in The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, the... Read More →

Ned Raggett

Ned Raggett can’t believe his good fortune at being able to walk to work each weekday in San Francisco instead of needing to take a bus. When not pondering his library duties and bemusing others with a tendency to explain Tolkien minutiae in detail -- usually unprompted -- he writes... Read More →

Rob Sheffield

Rob Sheffield is the author of Dreaming The Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World (Dey Street, 2017). His books include On Bowie, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love and Karaoke, Talking To Girls About Duran Duran and Love Is A Mix Tape. He writes for Rolling... Read More →

Friday April 27, 2018 5:45pm - 7:15pm PDT
JBL Theater MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

5:45pm PDT

Roundtable: The Butch Throat

Taylor Black, E Glasberg, Sarah Kessler, Mairead Sullivan

“The Butch Throat”
This roundtable on “The Butch Throat” begins in unashamed appreciation for Wayne Koestenbaum’s 1993 The Queen’s Throat, a book so full of strange insight and recondite lore on vocal training, voice, gender, sexuality, and race that its very diva-like boldness of its central claim: that “[v]oice is a system equal to sexuality…” (155); “sexuality is structurally vocal” (172) has nearly smothered out its possible refrains. Perhaps too easily dismissed because of its experiential specificity and campy object, opera, its obsessions of a stereotypic gay male fan, The Queen’s Throat (if not Koestenbaum) might well be rolling its eyes these days in mock surrender: ok, ok, let’s be really straight and earnest about voice and sexual identity. In following Koestenbaum’s critique of “voice culture’s … training and liberating of the natural voice,” we don’t want to be sociologically correct in describing – or elegizing -- yet another voice or identity category. Rather, we want to emphasize the butch throat as a passageway through which we plan to force new air to think of new voices and bodies -- beginning but not trilling -- on the note of butch.
Panelists will discuss the butch throat in relation to region, class, and race (voice placement), as species (posthuman categorization), mimicry (taking on Female Masculinity and its origin story). The panel will offer new ways to engage mind-body split, transgender bodies, inter-species, bodiless bodies, disabled bodies and cracked voices, extending the conversation from opera and its gay male subjects and communities into other throwback or devolutionary species such as Amy Ray’s “southern gar” (a garbling of girl) and the British-Caribbean contrary contralto Joan Armatrading, and interspecies voicing, and to investigate the butch throat as a site for sexual difference and the re- and dis-embodying of butch sexual practices.
Voice production is an area rich for testing out gender and sexuality rules. Training the voice is ineluctably unnatural and subject to shifting taste and structural regimes. Yet as intense and rare and stringent as proper voice training is, its results are the basis for normalizing the strict gendering of voice categories: an alto is never a tenor, for example, though their note range may overlap; their coloring and pitch and tone may never. The training of gendered voices enhances and naturalizes social gender categories. And yet, that very artificial training would as easily contribute to the dismantling of the gendered voice. It does, in fact, on stage, from falsetto and trouser roles; in history with castratos, modern counter tenors, as well as a host of pop voice categories. Voice, for all its uses as sexuality’s “tell” is potentially anarchic – thus, as with sexuality, the overly-stringent management of voice. Thus, the endless and yet disavowed training of the most malleable sexual organ, the throat.

Speakers

Taylor Black

Taylor Black is Assistant Professor of English at Duke University. He has published on twentieth century American literature, popular music, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, ontology and theories of becoming and, above all, the subject and practices of style in Women’s... Read More →

E Glasberg

E Glasberg writes about US culture in transit and has taught at American University in Beirut, Princeton University, Duke University, and California State University, Los Angeles. Author of Antarctica As Cultural Critique: The Gendered Politics of Scientific Exploration and Climate... Read More →

Sarah Kessler

Sarah Kessler is a media scholar and television critic. Her book project, Anachronism Effects, focuses on ventriloquism in transatlantic popular culture. Her writing has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Camera Obscura, In These Times, Public Books, Triple Canopy, and Women’s Studies... Read More →

Mairead Sullivan

Friday April 27, 2018 5:45pm - 7:15pm PDT
Sky Church

Roundtable

9:00am PDT

Black Spirit

Diana Buendía "My Blood, My Eyes: Ibeyi Within the Politics of Afro Cubanidad & Transcultural Spectatorship"
Ashon Crawley "The Hammond B-3: Blackness and Circum-sacred Performance"
James Hill "I’ll Be Grotesque Before Your Eyes: Black Religion, Michael Jackson, and the Monstrosity of Racial Performativity"
Christina Zanfagna "The Bondage of Bling: Chain Gangs in Pop Music from Black Power to Black Lives Matter"

Moderator: RJ Smith

What does the concept of the spiritual do to the sound heard, the sound felt, the hearing and feeling of worlds otherwise? These worlds otherwise would be heard and felt as the suffusion of that which stands with and before and against normative understandings of spacetime as linear and forward propulsive. These worlds otherwise would be heard and felt as a critique to the concept of the normative world and its production of racial, class, gender and national stratifications, hierarchies and violences that attend such differentiation. This panel brings together four papers that attempt to think the concept of the spiritual with relation to black sound, sounds of blackness, to intervene into performance studies and sound studies by way of black sonic cultural production as a force and verve and practice.

Speakers

Diana Buendía

Diana Buendía is from Guayaquil, Ecuador and lives, works and writes in Los Angeles. She moved to the U.S. to get her undergraduate degree in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and a graduate degree in arts journalism from the School of the Art Institute of... Read More →

Ashon Crawley

Ashon Crawley teaches Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at University of Virginia. He is author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (2016)."The Hammond B-3: Blackness and Circum-sacred Performance" Black life is circum-sacred performance... Read More →

James Hill

James Hill is a PhD student (Religious Studies) at Northwestern University. His research draws upon a multidisciplinary array of scholarship including necropolitics, race, performance studies, and cultural studies in the Americas and throughout Atlantic geographies. His work also... Read More →

RJ Smith

Christina Zanfagna

Saturday April 28, 2018 9:00am - 11:00am PDT
Learning Labs MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

9:00am PDT

Platforms: Sonic, Feminist, Diva, Disco

Maria Elena Cepeda Moments of Recognition: Globalizing Latina/US-Colombian Girlhood in Bomba Estéreo’s “Soy yo”
Roshanak Kheshti "Synthesizing the World: On the Moog Global Modular Synthesizer Project"
Alyxandra Vesey "Songbirds in the Kitchen: Female Soul and Country Singers as Cookbook Authors and the Intersectional Politics of Comfort Food"

Moderator: Alyxandra Vesey

This panel takes up the concept of "platform" in considerations of music and gender. Thinking beyond the term's 21st century connotation as a digital streaming service, panelists consider the ways musical artists and designers have created and transformed our understandings of gender, sexuality, and feminism through and on a range of platforms—from synthesizer sounds to viral videos, from music diva cookbooks to the signature platform-heeled stylings of disco and funk. Questions explored include: In what ways does the viral video, "Soy Yo," provide a platform for expressing Latina and specifically Colombiana feminist sensibilities? What are the geo-political and gendered implications of the "patched" sonic platform of the Moog synthesizer? How does the platform of the cooking show enable pop music divas to showcase their longevity in ways that are foreclosed by the ageism and sexism of music industry? How do Labelle's silver soul sound and silver-platform stylings create an "outer" space for inhabiting racialized and queer sexualities? Collectively, these papers illuminate not just music as a platform for expressions of gender and sexuality but also the gendered possibilities and limitations of particular technological, generic, or stylistic platforms within the music industry.

Speakers

Maria Elene Cepeda

María Elena Cepeda is Professor of Latina/o Studies at Williams College, where she researches the intersection of gender and race in Latina/o media and popular culture. Cepeda is author of Musical ImagiNation: U.S.-Colombian Identity and the Latin Music Boom and co-editor of The... Read More →

Roshanak Kheshti

Alyxandra Vesey

Alyxandra Vesey is an assistant professor in Journalism and Creative Media at theUniversity of Alabama. Her research focuses on the intersection between gender, race, authorship, music culture, and media industry labor. She is currently working on a manuscript about the identity politics... Read More →

Saturday April 28, 2018 9:00am - 11:00am PDT
Sky Church

Panel

9:00am PDT

Producing the Interface

Adele Fournet "Recorded Popular Music: Production and Reproduction"
Matt Sakakeeny "Brass Instruments are Gendered Technologies"
Sasha Geffen "Synthesizers and Cyborgs: Vocal Processing as a Transhumanist Gateway"
Deirdre Loughridge "On Sounding (Not) Like a Person in 2016"

Moderator: Charlie McGovern

The interrelations of people and technology are overdetermined by gender and sexuality. What barriers persist in maintaining the dominance of men as record producers and engineers? Even in antiquated domains of technology, like drums and brass instruments, women remain starkly underrepresented. The ways that technology is gendered goes further, beyond the troubled categories of man and woman. Technological manipulation of the human voice, reinforced by visual presentations of the cyborg, allows artists such as Anohni and Björk to explore futuristic and mutated gender expressions. But how to identify a female voice that a male producer has transmuted into a cyborg through computer processing? The cyborg, as an idealized hybrid of human and machine, does not necessarily fulfill the promises of feminist and queer theory. Bringing together an array of technologies and gendered identities, these four papers unsettle presumptions about the human-machine interface. In each instance, dynamics of power condition the dynamics of people and things.

Speakers

Adele Fournet

Adele Fournet is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at NYU where she investigates gender, music production, technology and aesthetic values. She is an active composer, producer, musician and freelance videographer in New York City. She directs a web series about female music producers... Read More →

Sasha Geffen

Sasha Geffen is a writer based in Denver. Their work examines music, popular culture, and gender, and especially the intersections among the three. In 2015, they moderated a keynote panel on music at the Theorizing the Web conference in New York, and in 2017 they spoke on a panel... Read More →

Deirdre Loughridge

Deirdre Loughridge is Assistant Professor of Music, and affiliate faculty in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, at Northeastern University. Her first book, Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow: Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism (University of Chicago... Read More →

Charlie McGovern

Charlie McGovern teaches American Studies and History at William and Mary. A PopCon attendee from the beginning, he is at work on Body & Soul, a book tracing race, citizenship, and capitalism in mid century American music. He wrote Sold American Consumption and Citizenship, 1890-1945... Read More →

Matt Sakakeeny

Matt Sakakeeny is Associate Professor of Music at Tulane University. He is the author of Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans and co-editor of Keywords in Sound, both on Duke University Press. This year he will release his first solo album as The Lonely Birds."Brass... Read More →

Saturday April 28, 2018 9:00am - 11:00am PDT
Demo Lab MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

9:00am PDT

Punk, Indie, Alt

Jenn Pelly "In the Sea of Possibility: Feminine Punk After Patti"
Grace Elizabeth Hale "Playing Like a Girl: Gender and Amateurism in the Athens, Georgia Music Scene"
Franklin Bruno "Salem 66 Didn’t Suck, and Neither Did Tsunami: A Counter-Memoir"
Robert Christgau "Enduring Love and Tonic Counterpoint in Three American Alt-Rock Bands"

Moderator: Kevin Dettmar

Speakers

Franklin Bruno

Franklin Bruno’s most recent recording is The Human Hearts’ Viable (Sump Pump). Past and present musical projects include Nothing Painted Blue, solo work, and collaborations with John Darnielle, Jenny Toomey, Laura Cantrell, and Bree Benton. He is the author of Armed Forces, in... Read More →

Robert Christgau

A rock critic since 1967, Robert Christgau co-keynoted the first Pop Conference and has presented at every subsequent edition. His memoir, Going Into the City, was published by Dey Street Books in 2015 and his collection, Is It Still Good to Ya?, is due from Duke University Press... Read More →

Kevin Dettmar

Kevin Dettmar is W. M. Keck Professor and Chair of English at Pomona College. He is past editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies; co-editor of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series; editor of The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan; co-editor (with Jonathan Lethem) of Shake It Up: Great... Read More →

Grace Elizabeth Hale

Jenn Pelly

Jenn Pelly is a Contributing Editor at Pitchfork and author of The Raincoats, a volume in the 33 ⅓ series on the British feminist punk band. Her writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, SPIN, The Wire, The Village Voice, and Teen Vogue. She lives in New York."In the Sea of Possibility... Read More →

Saturday April 28, 2018 9:00am - 11:00am PDT
JBL Theater MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

11:15am PDT

Back in the Day

Rachel Miller "The True Origins of the Talent Agency: How Lady Vocalists and Fancy Dancers Built the Entertainment Industry"
Meghan Drury “Doing the Kutchy, Kutchy”: Tin Pan Alley, Belly Dance Music, and the Limits of White Femininity
Lori Brooks "The 'Red Hot Mama' in Black and White: Teddy Peters as 'The Mae West of Harlem'"

Moderator: John Shaw

Speakers

Lori Brooks

Lori Brooks is a postdoctoral fellow in African & African American Studies at Fordham University and an adjunct professor in Africana Studies at Barnard College in New Yawk, New Yawk. She publishes in the areas of popular music (ragtime), vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, the history of... Read More →

Meghan Drury

Meghan Drury received her Ph.D. in American Studies at George Washington University and teaches at Portland State University. She is working on a manuscript tentatively titled “Sonic Arabness: The Middle East in the American Popular Music Imaginary, 1950-2010.” She is managing... Read More →

Rachel Miller

Rachel Miller is a PhD candidate in American Culture at the University of Michigan, where she is completing a dissertation titled “Capital Entertainment: Stage Work and the Origins of the Creative Economy, 1830-1910.” Her work has been published in scholarly journals and edited... Read More →

John Shaw

John Shaw is the author of This Land That I Love: Irving Berlin, Woody Guthrie, and the Story of Two American Anthems.

Saturday April 28, 2018 11:15am - 12:45pm PDT
Learning Labs MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

11:15am PDT

Mansplaining

Andy Zax, "She Comes To Me Softly With Crackers And Beer”: The Creeptastic MOR Misogyny Of Bobby Goldsboro"
Stephen Thomas Erlewine "Where Are All The Nice Girls: How Power Pop Created A World Without Women"

Moderator: Glenn MacDonald

Speakers

Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Glenn McDonald

Andy Zax

Andy Zax (@andyzax) is a Grammy-nominated music producer. His writing--under his own name and the pseudonym @Discographies--has appeared in Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The Oxford American and elsewhere. The Village Voice hailed him as its music critic of the year in 2010, and... Read More →

Saturday April 28, 2018 11:15am - 12:45pm PDT
JBL Theater MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

11:15am PDT

Pacific Rimming: Sonic and Sexual Fantasies

Thea Quiray Tagle "It’s Not Right But It’s Okay: Queer Filipino Performances of (Un)Dead Black Divas"
Manan Desai "Bamboo and Brass: The Sexual Politics of Exotica’s Asia"
Brian Su-Jen Chung "Back to School: The University of Hawaii and Queer Indie Music Scene-making in Honolulu"

Moderator: Ashon Crawley

This trio of presentations traverses multiple geographies and histories of queer sound and performance in the mainland United States, Hawai’i and the Pacific, and Asia. Our work explores several modes through which diasporic amateur and professional artists in these spaces labor to imagine the social, racial, and sexual Other-as-Themselves through music-making and live performance. Manan Desai’s paper on the mid-century “Exotica” genre in the United States investigates the Cold War fantasies of mastery over Asia and Asian people which were played out in its consumption and production. Thea Quiray Tagle considers drag performances by queer Filipinos that turn African American divas into the undead as fantastic, yet prescient, spectacles that warn us all of our impending destruction. Brian Chung, meanwhile, looks to the indie music scene in Hawai’i as a site for queer worldmaking that transforms the islands from a tourist trap to an indigenous place. Together, our work tries to disrupt the borders between producer and consumer; original and copy; foreign and native in order to complicate the ways that we understand how individuals and collectives produce resistant sexual and racial identities and landscapes through performance and sound.

Speakers

Brian Su-Jen Chung

Brian Su-Jen Chung is assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His writing has been published in Biography: An Interdisciplinary Journal and Verge: Studies in Global Asias.“Back to School: The University of Hawaii and Queer Indie Music Scene-making... Read More →

Ashon Crawley

Manan Desai

Manan Desai is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan. He is currently completing his book The United States of India, about South Asian and American intellectual exchange during the 1910s and 20s. His writing has been published... Read More →

Thea Quiray Tagle

Thea Quiray Tagle, PhD is an independent curator and writer currently based in Seattle; she is also a faculty member in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and Cultural Studies at the University of Washington, Bothell. Her writing has most recently been published in the Journal of... Read More →

Saturday April 28, 2018 11:15am - 12:45pm PDT
Demo Lab MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

11:15am PDT

Roundtable: Women as Catalysts

Daphne Brooks, Ann Powers, Alexandra Vazquez, and Gayle Wald
Women as Catalysts
In his definitive rock-critical book Mystery Train, Greil Marcus described the moment in which rock and roll, an amorphous stirring in the wind of black, white, and Latina/o/x American popular music, pinned itself down within the body of the southern white male. “Rockabilly fixed the crucial image of rock and roll: the sexy, half-crazed fool standing on stage singing his guts out.” Marcus identifies rockabilly as the birthing ground of rock ‘n’ roll because it was also a battleground: the space where white performers, the designated subjects of a segregated and hierarchical popular music industry, could “beat the black man at his own game.” In 1982, Marcus was simply noting the binary divide that had already come to define rock and roll: the violating love white music fans felt for black culture played off against the efforts of black male artists to reclaim that culture, whether through assimilating (beating the white man at his own game), separating or riding black pride into powerful acts of rebellion.
Yet this binary, masculinized view of rock and roll history, reinforced on every level from the Billboard charts to the touring and recording industries to the media outlets that arose to turn a musical subculture into a countercultural lifestyle, reduces and distorts the full view of popular music’s evolution in the rock and soul era. Simply place another body at the center of the fixed image and the entire story changes. That body might be Ruth Brown’s, dismantling convention the way a woman would by shouting, “Mama! He treats your daughter mean,” or Brenda Lee, who at eight years old busted out dance moves as wild as anything Elvis managed when he was almost no longer a teenager. There is a way to document and elucidate the rock and roll revolution that does not consider women an extraneous element within a dialogue between men, but which examines how women’s pivotal innovations and interventions shaped a broader music culture than the one rock history -- and, in many ways, rock criticism -- ever fully acknowledged.
This collaborative multimedia presentations staged by four scholars who have spent their lives shedding light on women’s central presence in popular music culture will shift the epistemological paradigm by recognizing and celebrating a history in which women are the catalysts, not merely extra players, overlooked geniuses or singular exceptions. Disturbing the conventional format of 20 min papers, our session is an ensemble effort with presenters taking turns to offer critical revisionist meditations on canonical moments in rock/pop history as well as snapshots of radical moments left out of the books that expand or trouble our notions of that history as well as how that history has been written about and reproduced.

Speakers

Daphne A. Brooks

Ann Powers

Alexandra T. Vazquez

Alexandra T. Vazquez is Associate Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. Her book, Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Duke University Press 2013), won the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Book Prize. Vazquez’s work... Read More →

Gayle Wald

Saturday April 28, 2018 11:15am - 12:45pm PDT
Sky Church

Roundtable

1:45pm PDT

Gender, Race, Class, and Age in Korean Music

Kendra Van Nyhuis "Intersectional Identities and Success in the Rock Scene of South Korea"
Myoung-Sun Song "2 Chainz & Rollies: Hip Hop as Self-Development Text in Neoliberal South Korea"
Heather Willoughby "That’s a Rap, Grandma: Battling Stereotypes, Gender Norms, and Generational Gaps in South Korea"

Moderator: J.D. Considine

Speakers

J.D. Considine

Kendra Van Nyhuis

Kendra Van Nyhuis is a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnomusicology at University of California Berkeley. Her dissertation interrogates the exchanges and collaborations of Korean and foreign musicians in the underground rock scene in Seoul. More specifically, her work examines networks, urban... Read More →

Myoung-Sun Song

Myoung-Sun Song is an Assistant Professor at Sogang University’s Department of American Culture. She received her Ph.D. in Communication from University of Southern California. Her research focuses on the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and (national) identity... Read More →

Heather Willoughby

Heather Willoughby received her Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University. Recent research and publishing efforts focus on gender and image-making issues in Korean popular music and contemporary p’ansori performance practices, as well as diverse topics covering comparative... Read More →

Saturday April 28, 2018 1:45pm - 3:15pm PDT
Learning Labs MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

1:45pm PDT

Girl Groups

Hilarie Ashton "Sonic Femmes: How the Ronettes Reshaped Rock 'n' Roll"
Matthew Connolly "Enduring Love: Ronnie Spector, Management, and the Confinement of the Voice"
Shaun Cullen "How Do You Spell Luv? Girl Group Pop and the Politics of Punk Appropriation"

Moderator: Greil Marcus

Speakers

Hilarie Ashton

Hilarie Ashton is an English Ph.D candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation, "Unsung Heroines in Black and White: Sixties Girl Groups as Radical Sonic Rebellion," positions the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las, and the Chiffons as at the forefront of rock and punk. She has... Read More →

Matthew Connolly

Matthew D. Connolly is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University at Buffalo. His research examines race, pop music and the professional managerial class in the post-Civil Rights era. His other interests include critical pedagogy, speculative bass-playing, and... Read More →

Shaun Cullen

Shaun Cullen is an assistant professor in the department of English at Middle Tennessee State University, where he teaches U.S. literature and popular culture, film, and music. His essays on Taylor Swift, Black Flag, and Kanye West have appeared in the Journal of Popular Music and... Read More →

Greil Marcus

Saturday April 28, 2018 1:45pm - 3:15pm PDT
Demo Lab MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

1:45pm PDT

More Mansplaining

Maxwell Williams "‘I know street shit, I know shit that’s conscious, I know everything’: Sounding Black Masculinity In Between"
Sean Nelson "Suffer Your Interpretation: Odes and Scolds from the Male Feminist Songbook"
Carl Wilson "In Search Of: Songs of Male Regret"

Moderator: Mairead Case

Speakers

Mairead Case

Mairead Case is a working writer and teacher. Currently a PhD Candidate at the University of Denver, she teaches at DU, the Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and every Friday at the Denver women's jail. Mairead has been a legal observer with the NLG for over a decade. She is... Read More →

Sean Nelson

Sean Nelson is a writer, musician, and actor who lives in Seattle, where he works as Editor-at-Large for The Stranger. He wrote the 33&1/3 book about Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark, and recently sang backing vocals for Linda Lewis and Neil Innes on the same night."Suffer Your... Read More →

Maxwell Williams

Maxwell Williams is a PhD candidate in musicology at Cornell University, where he researches US hip-hop and the African diaspora. He has given conference papers on topics ranging from gender construction in the music of Amy Winehouse to postcoloniality and London’s grime communities... Read More →

Carl Wilson

Saturday April 28, 2018 1:45pm - 3:15pm PDT
JBL Theater MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

1:45pm PDT

Roundtable: Recognizing Black Women's Complexities

Regina N. Bradley, Timothy Anne Burnside, and Bettina Judd

Like a Moth to a Flame Burned by the Fire:
Recognizing Black Women’s Complexities in Popular Music
Janet Jackson’s 1993 sultry remake of the song “That’s the Way Love Goes” opens with the line “Like a moth to a flame burned by the fire.” While Jackson is talking about the ups and downs of how love manifests itself, the imagery of the moth being burned by a flame also applies to how Black women attempt to view and position themselves in American society. Of particular interest is how Black women hold a peculiar space in popular culture: their bodies and cultural expressions are emulated, their style duplicated, but no room is made to recognize their agency. They are, in essence, burned by the very flame that they are attempting to master. The imposed expectations and biases placed upon black women about how to perform race, (hyper)sexuality, and class –in all senses of the word – also impact their autonomy. Black women’s search for space in memory, in culture, and in themselves is especially significant in popular music.

Our 90 minute roundtable is a discussion of how to recognize, interpret, and preserve the various threads of Black womanhood found in popular music. We are interested in not only how black women musicians create and package their narratives but also the frameworks and archives that are used to interpret their meanings and experiences. Specifically, we seek to redefine the touchstones of legible and illegible black womanhood as signifiers of a black (American) experience.

Speakers

Regina N. Bradley

Regina N. Bradley is Assistant Professor of English and African Diaspora Studies at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, GA. She writes about race and sound, hip-hop, and the post-Civil Rights Black American South. Her first book, Chronicling Stankonia: OutKast and the Rise of the... Read More →

Timothy Anne Burnside

Timothy Anne Burnside is a Museum Specialist in Curatorial Affairs at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). She works closely with object donors to build collections around music & performing arts and contemporary cultural... Read More →

Bettina Judd

Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist and performer whose research focus is on Black women's creative production and our use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. Her current book manuscript argues that Black women’s creative production... Read More →

Saturday April 28, 2018 1:45pm - 3:15pm PDT
Sky Church

Roundtable

3:30pm PDT

Body Vs. Machine

Mairead Case "How We Want It: Listening to Tracy + the Plastics"
Andi Harriman "Like Cockatoos: Femininity and the Other in 1980s Goth/Dark Electronic Subculture (a/k/a Robert Smith’s Lipstick)"
Chrissy Shively "Under the Covers: Gender and Sexuality in Sylvester's Cover Songs"
Michaelangelo Matos "A History of the Male Orgasm in Dance Music"

Moderator: Tricia Romano

Speakers

Mairead Case

Andi Harriman

Located in NYC, Andi Harriman is a writer on all things dark and Eighties-centric. She is the author of the book Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace: The Worldwide Compendium of Postpunk and Goth in the 1980s and her writing has appeared in the Village Voice, Noisey, Bandcamp Daily... Read More →

Michaelangelo Matos

Tricia Romano

Tricia Romano is the former editor in chief of the Seattle newspaper, the Stranger. She previously worked as a staff writer at the Seattle Times, and has been published in the New York Times, The Daily Beast, Dame, Rolling Stone, the New York Post, Dame, New York magazine, Slate... Read More →

Chrissy Shively

Chrissy Shively is an internationally touring DJ/producer with an eye toward dance music history: his previous projects “My Year of Mixtapes” and “My Year of Edits” focused on the history of house, disco, and other electronic dance genres. He currently runs two house music... Read More →

Saturday April 28, 2018 3:30pm - 5:30pm PDT
Demo Lab MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

3:30pm PDT

Reintroducing the Hardline

Jason King "Batman-Blackman: Notes on Black Rock and Outer-Pop Contributions to the Superhero Film Franchise"
Tavia Nyong’o "Freedom’s Flight: Enlightenment, Awakening, and Extinction in the work of MeShell NdegeOcello"
Francesca Royster "‘Baby, Could I Love You Tonight’: Tracy Chapman and Butch Recognition, Longing and Belonging in the Neo-Soul Moment"
Shanté Paradigm Smalls "In the Name of the Future Buddha: On The Death and Life of Sananda Maitreya"

Moderator: TBD

Speakers

Jason King

Tavia Nyong'o

Tavia Nyong’o is is a writer and teacher, and the author of two books, The Amalgamation Waltz (2009) and Afro-Fabulations (forthcoming). He has been attending EMP/Pop/MoPop/SyFy con since 2005, when he presented on the British punk band The Homosexuals. His first concert was the... Read More →

Francesca Royster

Francesca Royster is Professor of English at DePaul University. Her research interests include African American literature, popular music, performance, Race, gender and sexuality, as well as Creative-nonfiction. She is the author of Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon... Read More →

Shanté Paradigm Smalls

Shanté Paradigm Smalls, a performer and performance studies scholar who works at the intersection of blackness, popular culture, and critical theory, is also an Assistant Professor of Black Literature and Culture at St. John’s University. Find out more about their music and scholarship... Read More →

Saturday April 28, 2018 3:30pm - 5:30pm PDT
JBL Theater MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

3:30pm PDT

Sounding Gender

Andrew Flory "Sarah Vaughan and the Sonic Middlebrow"
Julia Nicholls "Orchestration and construction of gender identity in recordings of King/Goffin’s ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’"
Elizabeth Newton "Lo-fi Sound and Feminist Theory in the 1990s"

Moderator: Holly George-Warren

Speakers

Andrew Flory

Andrew Flory is Associate Professor of Music at Carleton College. He has written extensively about American rhythm and blues and is author of the book I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B (Michigan, 2017). Working directly with Universal Records, Andrew has served as consultant... Read More →

Holly George-Warren

Elizabeth Newton

The Graduate Center, CUNY

Elizabeth Newton is a writer and Ph.D. candidate in musicology at the CUNY Graduate Center, and she teaches music history at the City College of New York. She has written for Leonardo Music Journal, Real Life Magazine, The New Inquiry, the Quietus, Repeater Books, and Sounding Out... Read More →

Julia Nicholls

Julia Nicholls is a researcher, composer, arranger and performer studying the Master of Music (Research) at the University of Western Australia. Her research interests include 1960s and current girl group music, instrumentation and arranging in popular music, and the significance... Read More →

Saturday April 28, 2018 3:30pm - 5:30pm PDT
Learning Labs MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

3:30pm PDT

Roundtable: Critical Karaoke, Sex and the Singles Girl

Critical Karaoke, Sex and the Singles Girl
Presenter order for this presentation will be random.
It couldn’t be more simple: I am proposing a Critical Karaoke “roundtable” titled "Sex and the Singles Girl.” The participants, to be chosen as the conference approaches and in consultation with the program committee (as this generally draws from those already presenting), will each present on one pop single that takes up the questions of sex and/or gender, with a particular interest in femme/queer experience. My hope is that these presentations can go beyond the polarities of empowerment and disrespect that have characterized the majority of accounts of gender in pop, with the goal of understanding the ways that sex and gender relations are constitutive of the category of the pop single; the implicit historical argument is that the pop single couldn’t exist without the uneven sex and gender dynamics that we might wish to overcome. But that is just sort of my initial hypothesis, not something to which all presenters would be held. I hope also that a breadth of genres can be included. I think 8 panelists is a good number. I myself may well simply help organize, to leave more room for many critics and scholars who have made sex and gender an ongoing priority in their work. The end.
Moderator: Joshua Clover

Speakers

Regina N. Bradley

Joshua Clover

Joshua Clover is author of six books including poetry, cultural history, and political theory; he’s been translated into a dozen languages. His most recent book is Riot.Strike.Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (Verso 2016), a political economy of insurrection and renarration of capital’s... Read More →

Jessica Hopper

Robin James

Robin James is associate professor of philosophy at UNC Charlotte. She is author of Resilience & Melancholy (Zer0) and The Sonic Episteme (forthcoming with Duke University Press). Her writing has appeared in places like The New Inquiry, SoundingOut!, Noisey, Real Life, and The Journal... Read More →

Sarah Kessler

Rashod Ollison

Jenn Pelly

Ann Powers

Oliver Wang

Saturday April 28, 2018 3:30pm - 5:30pm PDT
Sky Church

Roundtable

5:45pm PDT

Contracts and Compacts

Matt Stahl "We’re All Kesha Now: How 19th Century Music and Misogyny Transformed Professional Work into Legal Servitude"
Robin James "You Don’t Own Me: Gender and Private Property in 21st Century Pop"
Katherine St. Asaph "I Don't See the Expression on My Face: The Uncanny Caricatures of Pop Stars in Memeland"

Moderator: David Shumway

Speakers

Katherine St. Asaph

Robin James

David R. Shumway

David R. Shumway is Professor of English, and Literary and Cultural Studies, and the founding Director of the Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University. His most recent book is Rock Star: The Making of Musical Icons from Elvis to Springsteen (2014). He has published numerous... Read More →

Matt Stahl

Matt Stahl is an associate professor of media and information studies, University of Western Ontario. Matt’s book Unfree Masters: Recording Artists and the Politics of Work (Duke, 2013) won the IASPM book prize. He is now researching “royalty reform”—a series of efforts by... Read More →

Saturday April 28, 2018 5:45pm - 7:15pm PDT
Learning Labs MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

5:45pm PDT

Gender, Orientalism, and Global Pop

Melissa Phruksachart "The Rocky Fellers: Doo-Wop’s ‘Little Brown Brothers’"
Douglas S. Ishii "Love. Angel. Music. (Maybe.): Neoliberal Feminism, No Doubt"
Meenasarani Linde Murugan “It’s Our Paradise and it’s Our Warzone”: Charting Cross Overs and Other Mobilities for the South Asian Diasporic Idol"

Moderator: Manan Desai

Speakers

Manan Desai

Douglas S. Ishii

Douglas S. Ishii is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northwestern University. He received his PhD from the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and previously was an inaugural Chancellor’s... Read More →

Meenasarani Linde Murugan

Meenasarani Linde Murugan is an Assistant Professor at Fordham University in the Department of Communication and Media Studies. She's written various academic online and print publications about media history, race, fashion, and gender, concerning contemporary programs like Mad Men... Read More →

Melissa Phruksachart

Melissa Phruksachart is Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. She received her PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2016. Her research examines economies of Asian American presence in transnational U.S entertainment... Read More →

Saturday April 28, 2018 5:45pm - 7:15pm PDT
Demo Lab MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

5:45pm PDT

Soul Radicals

Rashod Ollison "Ain’t Nobody Feel for You: Black Girl Rebellion and the Voice of Chaka Khan"
Alfred Soto "When I’m Bad, I’m Better: Angela Winbush’s Secular Salvation in Gospel and The Politics of the R&B Crossover"
Camilo Hannibal Smith "Trans rap in Texas"

Moderator: Matt Sakakeeny

Speakers

Rashod Ollison

Matt Sakakeeny

Camilo Hannibal Smith

Camilo Hannibal Smith is a culture writer who got his start contributing stories about hip-hop culture to publications such as the Los Angeles Times, Source magazine and The Smoking Section hip-hop website. He’s currently a freelancer based in Houston who frequently writes about... Read More →

Alfred Soto

Saturday April 28, 2018 5:45pm - 7:15pm PDT
JBL Theater MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

5:45pm PDT

Roundtable: Suburban Intersections

Moderator: Karen Tongson
Anthony Easton, Josh Langhoff, and Annie Zaleski

Suburban Intersections: Back Roads, Plazas, and Love Shacks
Ever since Americans saw those aerial photographs of Levittown, the first mass-produced suburb, the image of the suburbs has been clean, white, homogenized, and patriarchal. This image is intentional. Developers purposely built away from cities, on land considered empty, and over the decades the suburbs have become associated with discriminatory practices like redlining, breakdowns in public infrastructure like bussing into the cities, and, most recently, homeowners’ associations (often violently) enforcing normative codes of gender and sexuality. None of this should be ignored in favour of a revisionist pro-suburban view. But recent scholarship has attempted to reconcile queer, working class, or non-white stories to the suburbs, deepening our understanding of this unique space. For example, Karen Tongson’s 2011 Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries rediscovered the suburbs as a space for popular music to breed ideas about gender.
In three case studies, this panel will explore more potentials for gendered readings of the suburban. In these readings, gender can serve to interpret other identities, and these intersections of gender with other identities interrupt conventional ideas of geography -- as when Sam Hunt models working class masculinity by selling the idea of “back roads” to audiences who drive parkways and avenues, or when young Latino idols transform rural northern Mexican styles into slick pop crooning for second and third-generation Americans. In late-’70s Georgia, Athens musicians founded an underground scene that incorporated queer semiotics and a refusal of mainstream masculinity; a decade later, their music would help define the lives of suburban pop and rock fans.
Each of these scenes trades on a strong geographical component and a deep commitment to understanding shifting audience tastes. In country music, crises of masculinity and disappearing rurality work in anxious conjunction, as the spaces of exurb, suburb, and farm remain undecided, and new categories of butch performativity emerge. Recent teen and 20-something Latino stars like Christian Nodal, Luis Coronel, and Ulices Chaidez delineate a spectrum of masculinities through shifts in vocal style, melodic construction, instrumentation, and video iconography, situating themselves somewhere between old-school corrideros and boy band pinups. Similarly, after college towns became places of queer refuge, their icons -- especially R.E.M. and the B-52’s -- resonated with straight listeners in places like Levittown, a self-repeating system that complicated how adolescent fans perceived gradations of gender.
Our end goals are to posit gender as a set of performative lenses that put other issues of identity into social contexts, and to consider how those contexts fit into the land of the suburban imaginary.
Short presentations will be followed by general discussion and Q&A.

Speakers

Anthony Easton

Anthony Easton is a writer and artist from Hamilton, Ontario. They have been writing about country music for more than fifteen years. They have written for Spin, the Atlantic Online, Pitchfork, Nashville Scene and a number of other publications. They have shown in Edmonton, Toronto... Read More →

Josh Langhoff

Josh Langhoff is a church musician in the Chicago area, and the founder of NorteñoBlog, a mostly English-language website devoted to Mexican regional music. He has written about norteño music for the Village Voice, Pitchfork, the Minneapolis City Pages, the Cresset, and the Singles... Read More →

Karen Tongson

Annie Zaleski

Annie Zaleski is a freelance journalist, editor and critic based in Cleveland, Ohio. Previously, she was on staff as an editor at the Riverfront Times and Alternative Press; currently, she’s a contributing writer at The A.V. Club and a columnist at Salon. Her profiles, interviews... Read More →

Saturday April 28, 2018 5:45pm - 7:15pm PDT
Sky Church

Roundtable

9:00am PDT

Beats to Bodies in Hip-Hop

William H. Mosley, III "Can the ATLien Speak? Gender, Race, and the Politics of Performance in Contemporary Hip-Hop"
Christine Capetola "Vibrational Genealogies: Music Technology, Gender Presentation, and Racialized Sound in Grimes and Janelle Monáe's “Venus Fly”"
Justin aDams Burton "'Now She Wanna Lick My Plum': Producing Voices and Desire in Azealia Banks's '212'

Moderator: Charles Aaron

Speakers

Charles Aaron

Justin aDams Burton

Justin aDams Burton is Assistant Professor of Music at Rider University. He is the author of Posthuman Rap (Oxford 2017), co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music Studies (2018), and a regular contributor to Sounding Out!“Now She Wanna Lick My Plum”: Producing... Read More →

Christine Capetola

Christine Capetola is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and holds a M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University. Her doctoral research investigates how black pop stars in the mid-1980s (and some of their contemporaries) used digital... Read More →

William H. Mosley, III

William Mosley is a PhD Candidate in African and African Diaspora Studies and Portfolio student in Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned an MA in English. He also holds a bachelor's degree from Amherst College. William's research examines... Read More →

Sunday April 29, 2018 9:00am - 11:00am PDT
Demo Lab MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

9:00am PDT

Queer Histories

Alison Fensterstock "Patsy, Jackie, Bobby, Esquerita and Freedia: Queer & Nonbinary Southern Performers of Color at the Dawn of Rock and Roll and Today"
Charlie McGovern “We Don’t Need Another Dinah Washington!”: Johnnie Ray and American Pop
Nicholas Forster “There Are Souls Here…They Live in Layers of Time”: Sam Waymon and Bill Gunn’s Queer Transmedial Soulcraft
Joshua Palmer "'And the Rest Is Drag:' Queer Identity Border Wars and Gender Embodiment in RuPaul’s Drag Race Lip Syncs."

Moderator: Charles Hughes

Speakers

Alison Fensterstock

Alison Fensterstock is the former music critic for the New Orleans alt-weekly Gambit and the daily Times-Picayune, and (starting 2018) an adjunct professor at Tulane University. Her collection of oral histories focusing on regional rap traveled to four U.S. cities and Berlin as part... Read More →

Nicholas Forster

Nicholas Forster is a PhD candidate in African American Studies and Film & Media Studies at Yale University. Interested in the relationship between technology, race, sound and history he has published pieces in Film Quarterly, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, and liquid blackness... Read More →

Charles L. Hughes

Charlie McGovern

Joshua Palmer

Joshua Palmer is an MFA candidate in non-fiction at the University of Pittsburgh where he also works for the literary journal Hot Metal Bridge. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Music from Trinity University and his writing and criticism has appeared in Spectrum Culture as well... Read More →

Sunday April 29, 2018 9:00am - 11:00am PDT
JBL Theater MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

9:00am PDT

Women at the Foundations of Rock Writing

Norma Coates "What’s So Bad About Groovy? Teen Magazines of the mid-1960s as Proto-Rolling Stone"
Kevin Dettmar "Born of the Gossip Pages: Jane Scott, Lillian Roxon, and Rock Writing in/on the Margins"
Sean Latham "Thinking Twice: Bob Dylan in the Magazines"
David R. Shumway "Ellen Willis: (American) Cultural Studies Avant la Lettre"

Moderator: Jenn Pelly

Speakers

Norma Coates

Kevin Dettmar

Sean Latham

Sean Latham is the Walter Endowed Chair of English at the University of Tulsa where he serves as Director of the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities and Co-Director of the newly established Bob Dylan Research Institute. He has written or edited eight books on modern literature and... Read More →

Jenn Pelly

David R. Shumway

Sunday April 29, 2018 9:00am - 11:00am PDT
Learning Labs MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

11:15am PDT

Nashville's Mixed Messages

Carlo Rotella "I Come in Here So I Don't Have to Hate Her": Midland and the Barroom Weeper
David Cantwell "The Quiet Storm on Early 1980s Country Radio (Or Another Look at Sweet, Sweet Country Lovin’)"
Jewly Hight "Good Girls and Crazy Ex-Girlfriends: How Miranda Lambert and Carrie Underwood Have Fine-Tuned Their Performances of Country Femininity"

Moderator: Keith Harris

Speakers

David Cantwell

David Cantwell lives in Kansas City, MO. He contributes to New Yorker.com and to Rolling Stone Country. He is the author of Merle Haggard: The Running Kind and a coauthor of Heartaches by the Number: Country Music’s 500 Greatest Singles."The Quiet Storm on Early 1980s Country Radio... Read More →

Keith Harris

Keith Harris is the current and former music editor of City Pages in Minneapolis. He has written for Rolling Stone, Billboard, Pitchfork, the Village Voice and multiple magazines, newspapers, and websites that no longer exist. He blogs at usefulnoise.wordpress.com and tweets as @useful_noise... Read More →

Jewly Hight

Carlo Rotella

Carlo Rotella’s books include October Cities, Good with Their Hands, Cut Time, and Playing in Time. He contributes regularly to the New York Times Magazine and his work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Slate, The Believer, and The Best American Essays, and on WGBH... Read More →

Sunday April 29, 2018 11:15am - 12:45pm PDT
JBL Theater MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel

11:15am PDT

Rare or Unrepresented?

Emily Easton "Women Who Collect Records (And the Records They Love)"
Jes Skolnik "The Hideous Persistence of the Women in Rock Issue"
Megan Mitchell "Representation Matters: Information Professionals as Stewards of a More Equitable Music Canonization"

Moderator: Andy Zax

Speakers

Emily Easton

Emily Easton has a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Chicago in sociology and social sciences, respectively. Her research focuses on how people choose music, with a specific focus on underground... Read More →

Megan Mitchell

Megan Mitchell traverses the intersections of music, gender, and social justice in various capacities. As proprietor of the index of female/trans/non-binary composers of experimental music, Many Many Women, she acts as a media equity advocate. Mitchell is also a Master of Library... Read More →

Jes Skolnik

Jes Skolnik has been writing about music for the past couple of decades and making noise from a young age. Born into DC punk via two hippie musicians and raised in zine culture, they are currently the managing editor of Bandcamp Daily, a contributor to Pitchfork and other publications... Read More →

Andy Zax

Sunday April 29, 2018 11:15am - 12:45pm PDT
Learning Labs MoPOP, 325 5th Avenue N, Seattle, WA 98109

Panel